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Introduction: one thousand friends

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Notes

  1. Thanks to Batya Friedman for making this observation in conversation.

  2. Moreover, it is hard to believe that traditional world connotations of the term ‘friend’ are not an important driver for social networking sites’ appropriation of the term. In particular, it is hard to believe that the importance (and so selling power) of close, personal relationships to how we understand ourselves and what matters to us is not a driver of social networking sites appropriation of the term. Otherwise, why not simply have ‘contact list’?

  3. See, e.g., Sherman (1993), Thomas (1989).

  4. Aristotle, Magna Moralia, 1213a20–1213b.

  5. Op cit, Sherman, pp. 105–106.

  6. Op cit, Thomas, p. 147.

  7. Cooper (1980).

  8. Aristotle, Magna Moralia, 1213a 26-8; for extended discussion see also, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. 9, 9, 1169a35–1170b20.

  9. Cocking and Matthews (2000).

  10. Since most users online have well over one hundred friends and it makes no sense to suppose one might have anything like this number of close companion friends, the evidence cannot mean that most friendships online are about maintaining existing offline companion friendships. Rather, while users may have many hundred friends online and only a handful of companion friendships offline most online pursuit of companion friendship is being claimed to regard this handful.

  11. The explosion of various kinds of bullying online, especially among our young people, is one plain and central example.

  12. This is perhaps most strikingly captured by his ‘creation’ of the girl—with whom he thinks he falls in love—into a starlet (in ways increasingly more demanding, ridiculous and foreign to her) after his marriage had fallen into loveless disrepair.

  13. The Offensive Internet (2010).

  14. Guest (2008).

References

  • Cocking, D., & Matthews, S. (2000). Unreal friends. Ethics of Information Technology, 2(4), 223–231.

  • Cooper, J. M. (1980). Aristotle on friendship. In A. O. Rorty (Ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (pp. 322–333). Berkeley: University of California Press.

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  • Sherman, N. (1993). Aristotle and the shared life. In N. K. Badhwar (Ed.), Friendship: A philosophical reader. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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  • Thomas, L. (1989). Living morally: A psychology of moral character. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

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  • (2010) The offensive internet. US: Harvard University Press.

  • Guest, T. (2008). Second lives: A journey through virtual worlds. New York, NY: Random House.

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Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Kylie Cocking for on-going discussion of the ideas in this paper and some excellent editing of an earlier much less readable draft.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Melbourne, Australia

    Dean Cocking

  2. Delft, Netherlands

    Jeroen van den Hoven & Job Timmermans

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  1. Dean Cocking
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  2. Jeroen van den Hoven
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  3. Job Timmermans
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Correspondence to Dean Cocking.

Additional information

Exchange between Charles Foster Kane and his best friend Jeddidihah Leiland, Citizen Kane, RKO Pictures, 1941.

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Cocking, D., van den Hoven, J. & Timmermans, J. Introduction: one thousand friends. Ethics Inf Technol 14, 179–184 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-012-9299-5

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