Slightly Off KIlter

friend n.

1. A person whom one knows, likes, and trusts.
   
2. A person whom one knows; an acquaintance.
   
3. A person with whom one is allied in a struggle or cause; a comrade.
   

Friends help you move. Real Friends help you move bodies. (found on a t-shirt)

“I really don’t like it when other people assume their personal problems are interesting to me, and here I am acting as though mine are interesting to you”
(Mandarin Plaid ,by S. J. Rozan, 1996, St. Martin’s Press)

The best kind of friend is the kind you can sit on a porch and swing with, never say a word, and then walk away feeling like it was the best conversation you’ve ever had.

A real friend will tell you the truth

What is a friend? Is it your best friend from elementary school, with whom you’ve shared secrets for 30 years? Certainly. But… is the waitress you chat with 3 nights a week at your favorite diner a friend? What about your College roommate, with whom you still exchange Holiday cards but not much else? What about your co-workers? (Miss Manners (Judith Martin) has been counseling for years about misinterpreting a working relationship as friendship).

What about the people on your favorite mailing list? All of them? Some of them? How can you tell?

What can you share with your friends? Interesting anecdotes? Your current project? How your day went? Intimate details of your private life? Does what you can share depend upon which friend you share with? Should you ask first? Do you need to?

What is a friend?

Danny O’Brien has written an interesting essay about what he calls register (you’ll find the part I refer to about halfway down the page, after the horizontal divider). The essay isn’t (precisely) about friendship, but conversation helps make a friendship and the essay is about conversation.

In the real world, we have conversations in public, in private, and in secret. All three are quite separate. The public is what we say to a crowd; the private is what we chatter amongst ourselves, when free from the demands of the crowd; and the secret is what we keep from everyone but our confidant. Secrecy implies intrigue, implies you have something to hide. Being private doesn’t. You can have a private gathering, but it isn’t necessarily a secret. All these conversations have different implications, different tones.

Most people have, in the back of their mind, the belief that what they say to their friends, they would be happy to say in public, in the same words. It isn’t true, and if you don’t believe me, tape-record yourself talking to your friends one day, and then upload it to your website for the world to hear.

…

On the net, you have public, or you have secrets. The private intermediate sphere, with its careful buffering. is shattered. E-mails are forwarded verbatim. IRC transcripts, with throwaway comments, are preserved forever. You talk to your friends online, you talk to the world.

…

There are only two registers on the Net; public and secret. In the public sphere, everything you say is for everyone. Talk in the secret register, and you have something to hide.

In an online forum to which I belong, we’ve recently experienced the shattering of the private sphere, as several messages which (probably) should have been sent privately were sent publicly to the list. Several people’s beliefs about “what is friendship” have been overturned (or shattered) as well.

Can you be friends with 100 people on a mailing list? Do all your friends want to hear the same sorts of things about you? Are there levels to friendship, on or off the net? Are there barriers you shouldn’t cross in interactions with friends?

Has the nature of friend ship changed as more people join the online community? Or do we simply need to rethink what it means to be an acquaintance, a “net friend”, a co-worker, or a “true friend”?