Quality versus quantity: What does ‘friendship maintenance’ mean?
For the notion of friendship ‘maintenance’ is ambiguous— I might speak of ‘maintaining’ my garden, when by this I mean throwing some water on it just often enough to keep it limping along, or I might refer to my sustained and careful efforts to nourish and tend to it lovingly, to ensure that every part of it not only lives, but thrives. We know that new social media are being heavily used for friendship maintenance. We now require more nuanced empirical methods to determine what kind of maintenance we are really doing.
From Shannon Vallor’s (2011) very interesting philosophical piece on Facebook friendship in the light of Aristotleian virtue. Come on, it’s not often you get classical Greek philosophy mentioned along with 21st century social media!
Vallor, S. (2011). Flourishing on facebook: virtue friendship and new social media. Ethics and Information Technology. Online first: http://www.springerlink.com/content/k7754743398g3k65/