3 Ways Our Relationship With Social Media Warps Friendship

Embodied > Online

Shallow, transient friendships (or “acquaintances”) aren’t all bad—not every “friend” can be a best friend, of course—but those kinds of relationships aren’t built to bear the weight that comes with walking side by side on the road of faith. Unfortunately, the social internet specializes in the generation and maintenance of shallow, transient friendships that masquerade as deep ones. And because we spend more time scrolling our feeds than we do looking at faces, we’ve become far too comfortable with the shallow, transient relationships that social platforms provide. For many they have become the standard of friendship; they’ve supplanted real, embodied friendship. These relationships trick us into believing they are deep because they are so often built upon the idols of affirmation and engagement that we have come to worship. “If these people reply to my Instagram stories and retweet my tweets,” we think, “they must care about me.” This, of course, isn’t true. Let’s look at three different ways our relationship with the social internet warps our understanding of friendship.

1. The social internet makes friendship a commodity.

To commodify something as I mean it is to attribute commercial value to something that should be appreciated for its inherent value instead. Some examples of this are the commodification of human life in human trafficking or the slave trade, the commodification of holidays, such as the commercialization of Christmas, or even the commodification of natural wonders as seen in the area surrounding, say, Niagara Falls, a natural wonder engulfed by tourist shops capitalizing on the natural wonders they vandalize.

Friendship has been commodified by the social internet. You know this if you’ve ever caught yourself saying in conversation, as I have, “We’re like real friends, not like Facebook friends.” Connections on LinkedIn are seen as a measure of status and worth among professionals on this site. The number of likes a college student receives from his or her friends on Instagram is a measure of how true and loyal his or her friends are. Back in the day, Myspace provided its users the opportunity to rank their top eight friends in a sort of virtual Pantheon of People I Like. I distinctly remember hearing threats of Myspace top-eight expulsion being used to coerce friends in my middle school lunchroom.

I understand that this commodification of friendship may seem silly and not really a big deal, but it’s fair to say that people who have grown up using the social internet—those who built a top eight on Myspace, then amassed scores of “friends” on Facebook, then began to measure their friends’ loyalty in their Instagram support, then collected connections on LinkedIn as a means of career advancement— have been subtly (or maybe not so subtly) taught for the better part of two decades that friends are a means to an end. This is the commodification of friendship.

2. We mistake clicks of affirmation for acts of love.

This is obviously related to the commodification of friendship described in the first point, but it is pervasive enough that we briefly explore it specifically.

Love is at the core of friendship, and especially Christian friendship. One of the beauties of Christian friendship is that Christian friends may have similar hobbies or interests, but their friendship is most deeply rooted in the gospel belief they share. This makes Christian friendships especially unique and deep. When two people are bound together by the unmatched, sacrificial love of Christ as displayed in His death and resurrection, that friendship is bound to be much richer than two friends who connected over their love for sports or a particular kind of music. Friendship mediated by the social internet undermines this deep connection. How? We begin to see people who like our tweets or share our Facebook posts as “friends” without sharing any actual, deep connection with them. These people won’t bring meals to our homes when we face tragedy. They won’t sit in our living rooms and comfort us. Maybe they’ll start a GoFundMe, but that sounds an awful lot like commodification, doesn’t it?

Being physically present with the people we love matters. A retweet by a person on Twitter shouldn’t be seen as the same as a shoulder to cry on. To see such things as equal is to have a fundamentally broken understanding of what it means to be friends with someone. Of course, this isn’t to say we can’t retweet our friends’ tweets or connect with them on the internet. The concern is a matter of proportions. If we find that we experience a deeper connection with the people who like our Instagram posts than we do the people in our churches or neighborhoods, we have a problem, which leads to the final point.

3. We believe a digital connection can supplant an embodied connection.

The term parasocial relationship was coined in 1956 by two psychologists who wanted a word to describe the mediated relationships that audience members have with performers within mass media communications, specifically television at the time. Parasocial relationships are a problem because they foster the feeling of friendship and community without the benefits of it.

Parasocial relationship is most used when referring to a common person believing he or she has a relationship with a celebrity or character—like feeling like the characters on a TV show are your friends. Parasocial relationships mediated by the social internet can be the same—many people feel friend-like connections with their favorite influencers—but I would argue that parasocial relationships on the social internet also exist between non-celebrities. Parasocial relationships are a shell of real, embodied relationships.

My concern is that because Christians find pseudo-mentors, internet friends, and other kinds of parasocial relationships through the social internet, we are forsaking real friendships, opportunities to mentor or be mentored, and other real-life relationships in our midst. I fear that Christians pursue parasocial relationships on social media because we prefer them over real-life relationships with the people in our neighborhoods or churches. I fear that we don’t accidentally avoid real-life relationships because we pursue parasocial relationships, but that we intentionally avoid real-life relationships by pursuing parasocial relationships.

It should be easy to see how the ways the social internet warps our understanding of friendship affects the people in your churches. This isn’t to say we cannot form friendships with strangers on the internet. I have done this, and I am grateful to God for people who I have only ever interacted with through the internet, who I would call my friends. But if the people in your church see their Instagram followers or their old high school friends on Facebook in the same way they see the community group members with whom they gather each week, it can be a problem. Embodied relationships with brothers and sisters in Christ are more valuable than ethereal relationships with strangers, but unfortunately a growing group of people don’t see it that way.

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This is an excerpt from my book The Wolf in Their Pockets. I would be honored if you would consider purchasing and reading it.