#deresiewicz

FRIENDSHIP

Today my focus will be on friendship. Such a simple term and what seems like such a simple idea is much more complex than many of us ever realized. Along with this, social media has made friendships that much harder to examine, understand, and classify. Classification of friendships is something that I will be discussing, along with our personal intentions with the friendships entering them and after enduring them for some time. After reading articles by Bloor and Deresiewicz we know that friendships have dramatically changed over the course of history from close immediate blood all the way to what we have now which are friendship circles. We also know that there are two major types of friendship, one being an instrumental friendship and the other being a social friendship. Two very different types of friendship which tend to overlap quite a bit. For those that don’t know, an instrumental friendship is one where there is give and take, one that is for primarily business. The social friendship is one that you have just because you enjoy it, with no real intentions other than caring for that other person.

Both of these types of friendships can be seen in the social media accounts I have started following. It is incredibly interesting to me that there are two distinct levels of these friendships. One level is that you can see the instrumental and social relationships in the Celebrity’s/musicians life, and from the outside you can see our (the viewer/followers) instrumental and quasi social friendships with the musicians. There are two pictures from @foofightersteam that express this rather simply. The first is that of front-man Dave Grohl singing with model and songwriter Taylor Greenwood. This is an example of an instrumental relationship because these two did not know each other too well before this concert and they had met just for a song in the setlist and that’s about all as far as we, the fans, know. The other picture is a picture of drummer Taylor Hawkins hugging front-man Dave Grohl after one of their shows. Although we know they are a part of a band and that part can be seen as an instrumental friendship, the two genuinely care for each other and love playing together which transcends this from an instrumental friendship to that of a social friendship that is seen in that picture.

According to the social scientists, the last of the millennials are now gracing our high school campuses. The Pew Research Center report on this cohort describes them as "confident, connected, and open to change." I agree. Technology is their metier. They...

William Deresiewicz

"Concentrating means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input. It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube—and just so you don’t think this is a generational thing, TV and radio and magazines and even newspapers, too—are all ultimately just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself. To avoid the difficult and troubling questions that being human throws in your way.

So it’s perfectly natural to have doubts, or questions, or even just difficulties. The question is, what do you do with them? Do you suppress them, do you distract yourself from them, do you pretend they don’t exist? Or do you confront them directly, honestly, courageously? If you decide to do so, you will find that the answers to these dilemmas are not to be found on Twitter or Comedy Central or even in The New York Times. They can only be found within—without distractions, without peer pressure, in solitude.

Thinking for yourself means finding yourself, finding your own reality. Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else. 

This is what we call thinking out loud, discovering what you believe in the course of articulating it. But it takes just as much time and just as much patience as solitude in the strict sense. And our new electronic world has disrupted it just as violently. Instead of having one or two true friends that we can sit and talk to for three hours at a time, we have 968 “friends” that we never actually talk to; instead we just bounce one-line messages off them a hundred times a day. This is not friendship, this is distraction."