Social Media Friendship

In her paper, Sharon Vallor mentions that while new social media provides little avenue for direct shared activities, they do reflect friends’ will to connect with their friends. (Vallor, 2011) Vallor’s paper focuses mainly on how new social media can contribute towards friendship by means of shared virtues. She does this by exploring the ethical significance of new social media trends relating to friendship. (Vallor, 2011) For her argument, she states that this “will” can be indicative of and meets the aims of friendship with respect to Aristotle. Indeed, with the limitations that are brought about by the fast pace of life and its circumstances, the significance of the will behind people’s actions is heightened considerably. This is especially

We choose what we want to upload on the new social media, we choose which photos to tag our friends in, and adjust our privacy settings to only show certain content to certain audiences. This brings about the issue of whether friendship on new social media can be considered if it does not show all of our “selves” to our friends. Hence, these new social media platforms may result in an inaccurate and superficial view of two people’s relationships. In a hypothetical situation, Person A and Person B belongs to the same clique of friends, but are not close friends themselves. The clique normally goes out and takes a lot of photos, and uploads these photos and activities to new social media sites. Using the new social media tools, such as the “View Friendship” tool by Facebook, it may appear as though Person A and Person B are close friends, but they are actually not. The scope of how new social media can actually represent the degree of friendship between two individuals is thus limited and possibly

In the near future, it will only continue to improve and be present in our lives, hence we ought to evaluate the implications it may have on what friendship today entails, and the way our friendship with others will change. Considering the rapid advancement of technology today in this increasingly globalized world, there may be a new way to perceive and maintain friendship. While friendship changes alongside the people involved, it also changes according to the circumstances in which the people involved are subjected to. For now, while I do not agree that new social media alone can accurately represent the degree of friendship between two individuals; I do believe that it is a rather important factor to consider. Of course, we must also note that while the vast majority of people use new social media, there is still a substantial amount of people that are not (although they may still be involved indirectly due to the people using these platforms). Thus, as of now, new social media has to take a backseat when we talk about representing the degree of friendship between individuals. Perhaps, as technology continues to advance, there can be more representative tools available in new social media that can evaluate friendship between