(BQ) Part 2 book "Facebook and philosophy - What's on your mind" has contents: The friendship that makes no demands, what are friends for, gossip and the evolution of facebook, do status updates have any value, wall to wall or face to face, faking it on facebook,.and other contents. | Facebook and Philosophy 6 8/4/10 8:11 PM Page 109 facebook Friends BBFs, Creepers, That Hawt Guy from Last Night, and Mom Facebook and Philosophy 6 8/4/10 8:11 PM Page 110 Facebook and Philosophy 6 8/4/10 8:11 PM Page 111 10 Why Can’t We Be Virtual Friends? CRAIG CONDELLA We suffer in carelessness in many of our undertakings: in none more than in selecting and cultivating our friends. —MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO From learning your Hobbit name to ranking your five favorite Sylvester Stallone movies to becoming a fan of Cheddar Bay biscuits, Facebook seems to be a little about everything. What unites all of this, however, is the one thing that Facebook is always in some sense really about: friendship. Just looking at the website’s main toolbar, “Friends” is listed alongside the user’s homepage, personal profile, and Inbox, a position that suggests the importance of friends within the Facebook universe. Indeed, the influence of Facebook on friendship is evidenced by the introduction of the word “friending” into the English language. The emergence and use of the word “friending” suggests two things: first, that Facebook users are becoming increasingly common; and second, that something new and different must be happening here as it otherwise would not have been necessary to devise a new term. Friending, despite what its name might suggest, is not synonymous with the process by which friendships are formed. Whereas friending is an almost instantaneous process that oftentimes presupposes a pre-existing friendship, becoming friends is a decidedly longer process which culminates in friendship. Friending thereby becomes our first clue to the differences separating virtual friendships from friendships in what we might call the “real” world. But what are these differences and how significant are 111 Facebook and Philosophy 6 112 8/4/10 8:11 PM Page 112 Craig Condella they? Are virtual friendships not really friendships at all or are the differences .
