The Inherent Disorder of Social Media Friendships
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Editor’s note: This article is republished with permission of the author. The original article is available here.
I want you to think back to childhood and remember when you met one of your best friends. You may not remember all the exact words, but you might be able to recall the situation. Maybe you were in the same classroom and got partnered up for some activity. Maybe you were at recess and were part of the same kickball game. Perhaps your parents were friends already, so you met at some party or event.
Your first interaction was very surface-level. I do not mean that in a derogatory fashion. That is how most relationships start. It is a low-stakes situation; you talked about drawing a picture, playing a game, or what was for dinner when you were a kid. Even as an adult, when someone new starts to work in your office, you ask about their last job, their family, or talk about the weather. You do not dive right into their hopes, dreams, fears, and vulnerabilities. That would be incredibly awkward and would be considered prying by most people.
Now I would like you to consider a conversation you may have had with your best friend or inner circle of friends recently. Perhaps you started talking about things that were much more personal or even controversial. You might have talked about political or religious matters. You might have talked about problems you are having with your job or family. You may have disclosed an area in which you are struggling. Because these people have proven themselves to be your closest friends and you have a relationship already built, you probably felt comfortable opening up without fear of ridicule or antipathy. A more developed relationship allows for a greater level of emotional intimacy.
Many of my close friends have very different political and religious beliefs than I do. We talk about these things from time to time, and we disagree, but we have a friendship already built. We already like each other, so our relationship is resilient enough to handle the disagreement. It is almost like a pyramid; we have a base of things that we enjoy doing together, so the structure survives.
However, when I think about these friends with whom I have substantial disagreements, none of our friendships really started talking about these areas of disagreement. I don’t know what would have happened if we had jumped right into a debate the first time we met. Maybe we would have gotten sick of each other and never talked again. Maybe we would have gotten extremely frustrated and just decided to go our separate ways rather than finding time to find other areas of common interest. Perhaps you are different from me, but I don’t tend to run headfirst into conflict if I can help it. I’m not afraid of conflict, but I would rather sit around and laugh and enjoy people’s company than always fight with them. I am willing to have good-natured conflicts with people I like because I understand that, at the end of the day, despite our disagreements, we can still be friends.
I think that we all understand that this is the natural way relationships ought to develop. It feels right to us intuitively. Even in a romantic relationship, you begin by casually going out with someone, and ideally, that relationship develops more and more intimacy until it becomes a lifelong marriage. Although there are reality shows that have people get married in thirty days, most of us would be uncomfortable with becoming that close to someone so quickly.
“Whether the relationship is platonic or romantic, there are levels of disclosure depending on the proximity of that relationship.”
Social media turns this dynamic upside down, and I believe that this is one of the reasons why social media tends to become so toxic.
Many of us view social media as an outlet for our thoughts and opinions. Because we view our walls as a place for self-expression, we tend to share things that are important to us. We don’t normally talk about the boring things that begin relationships. Although I have posted about extreme weather conditions before, I rarely post about something like that. I am much more likely to post about something I feel is really important and want other people to know about. In other words, I tend to post about things much closer to the deeper parts of my being, the things that are much more personally significant.
The people who see my Facebook posts range from my best friends to people I hardly know. Perhaps you could criticize my tendency to accept Facebook friendships from people I do not know, and there is a case to be made for not doing that. However, I have been involved in public ministry projects like An Unexpected Journal. If people want to connect with me and if it helps spread the word about good projects, I don’t like to turn people away very often.
You can see the problem with this dynamic almost immediately. I sometimes share very personal thoughts and core beliefs with a group of people who hardly know me. To use the imagery from the beginning of this piece, I am having a conversation with a bunch of new acquaintances that I should be having with my close friends.
When one of these people I barely know takes issue with one of my closely held beliefs that I have decided to share because I believe it is important, I have very little investment in wanting to maintain that friendship. After all, this is not one of my close friends that I am going to want to hold onto, despite my disagreement. If we picture a scale, there is nothing on the side of good times and good memories to offset the frustration that comes with conflict and ideological contradiction. Therefore, I might tend to lash out. I might tend to want to slam that ridiculous belief. After all, that person came after my beliefs on my wall; I have to show my friends that my way is the right way.
Escalation is inevitable in this situation. The conflict escalates until we have toxicity. We are quick to blame so many different things, but I hope you understand that the model of social media friendship is disordered.
“We live in a world that ought to be ordered, and with disorder ultimately comes chaos. Social media brings our acquaintances to a level of relational intimacy that ought to be reserved for our closest friends. ”
No wonder we get so frustrated with people and talk about other people trolling our page. I don’t know anyone who calls their friend a troll, but I know many people who accuse their Facebook “friends” of trolling them. Would your friend troll you? Not one of your best friends, even if you disagree with them, because you know them on a deeper level than just as an Internet provocateur.
You might be wondering how to handle this problem. You might be wondering what we can do to reorder friendships appropriately in the social media age.
First, I think private messages are great. Yes, I still post things publicly, but a great deal of my social media activity takes place on Facebook Messenger. I talk to people about all kinds of things. Some are serious; some are not. Some are controversial, while some are bland. Having this kind of correspondence friendship is superior to debating on public walls. I find there is less grandstanding. I also find that I can approach my friendships in the proper order. Am I talking to someone I barely know? I talk about surface-level things. I get to know them and develop a friendship that might develop into a closer friendship. Am I talking to someone I have known for several years? We can talk about heavier things, understanding that our friendship will survive even if we disagree. Rather than broadcasting our every thought, private messages are a great way of utilizing social media to associate with people on the appropriate relational level.
Second, we need to decide if we want to be public figures. Some people are called to be public intellectuals. They want to put their ideas out there. If you want to do that, you need to be comfortable with the fact that some people will not agree with you. You can’t be offended that people decide to troll you. Being a public intellectual is not for you if your skin is thin. If you are actively trying to promote ideas, then on some level, you are working as a public intellectual (insert joke about a lot of us being more or less intellectual than others, which is true).
That being said, being a public intellectual is also different than developing friendships. If you are a public intellectual, you develop a following. Your followers are not the same as your friends. I would argue that public intellectuals still need to develop friendships in the same order as I have outlined above. I have a feeling that if you went out to dinner with Patrick Deneen, you might not dive into a deep political debate the first time you met. You would probably get to know each other and might become friends. You might ideologically disagree with him and enjoy his company as a friend. Robert George and Cornel West are rather famous for this, as were Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Even public intellectuals make friends in the order I suggested, even though because of their platforms, many people just yell about them.
As a result, if you want to be a public figure, recognize that you still need to follow the formula to make friends. Your friends are going to be those you build a relationship with, not those who idolize or despise you.
Finally, treat social media for what it is. With its fundamentally flawed friendship order, it cannot do the job of making friends for you. It is not well suited for that. However, I have developed some amazing friendships with people I have never met in person. Social media has helped me facilitate that. I am not going to sit here and say that you cannot make friends on social media. That would be demonstrably false in my life and probably in yours. Nevertheless, we became friends in the proper order. We chatted about basic things, realized we had areas of common interest, developed our friendship more deeply, and became great friends in the process who were able to talk about all kinds of things without threatening the existence of that friendship.
We live in a world that is desperate for friendship, and we look for it on social media. However, suppose we do that without considering the true development of friendships. In that case, we will be frustrated when they continually burn out due to getting too deep too fast.
*NOTE*
I have been wrestling with this conception of social media friendship for some time and would love to hear your experiences and stories. I am considering expanding this theory into a book-length treatment, but that is in a very early stage. If you think it would be interesting, I would love to hear some encouragement to motivate me to start working.
Dr. Zachary D. Schmoll earned his Ph.D. in Humanities from Faulkner University after defending his dissertation entitled, Great Men? Considering Chesterton and Belloc’s Role in the History of the Distributist Movement. He also earned his M.A. in Apologetics at Houston Baptist University and was an Honors College Scholar while double majoring in Business Administration and Statistics at the University of Vermont.
Schmoll is honored to have served as the Managing Editor of An Unexpected Journal from its inception until the end of 2022. An Unexpected Journal is a quarterly publication that seeks to demonstrate the truth of Christianity through both reason and the imagination to engage the culture from a Christian worldview. What began as an informal discussion among friends about the need for a journal of cultural apologetics has developed into a respected publication that has received contributions from some of the most important scholars in the field.
Within the field of cultural apologetics, Schmoll's main research interest is the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. Specifically, he is interested in studying Samwise Gamgee as Tolkien's "chief hero," the role of the supernatural in Tolkien's legendarium, and the importance of community chiefly in the Shire but also throughout Middle-earth. Some of his other research interests include the work of G.K. Chesterton, the role of Christianity in the public square, and the development of Western Civilization from Athens and Jerusalem.
Schmoll lives in rural Vermont where he enjoys power soccer, bonfires, and, sadly, the Philadelphia Phillies.
