Care Ethics, Friendship, and facebook

Let’s face it. Facebook is fun. It’s compelling and addictive. One reason that Facebook is so enjoyable is that it feeds our egos. We can put up photos of ourselves and publish all kinds of self-descriptive information for the world to see. All of our opinions can be made public: a paradoxical confirmation of our own existence through the placement of electrons in a virtual realm.

In a world that looks askance at my Star-Trekiness, I can reveal my true nature with only minimal criticism. I can adorn my homepage with Star Trek photos and quotes, take as many Star Trek trivia quizzes as I want, and even profess on my information page that Star Trek is my religion! However, this is not a private narcissism: I post on Facebook for others to see. It is, after all, a network within a network: a social network embedded in a data transfer network. Such self-revelation is an important aspect of risk and knowledge of friendship.

Friendship on Facebook is a formal ritual of ask and acceptance similar to Victorian formality. I can even recommend friends to others much like the “letters of introduction” used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to vouch for someone. Beneath the veneer of Victorian formality, however, existed passionate friendships, which, at least for women, sometimes exceeded the caring intimacy of marriage relationships.⁶⁵ What kind of friendship exists beneath the formalism of Facebook’s social network?

My Facebook friends poke me, sometimes they write on my wall, sometimes they send me digital gifts, sometimes they chat with me, but most of the time they don’t direct anything to me at all. They just exist out there in cyberspace passively monitoring or ignoring my updates, just as I do with their updates. Their communication, like mine, is largely directed in a nonspecific manner. We post about our lives and hope to get a rise out of others. It leaves me wondering about the depth of these relationships. Paraphrasing Judas’s lament in Jesus Christ Superstar about God (and applying it to my Facebook friends, who are also ubiquitous and unseen), “Do they care for me?”

Caring is the pivotal issue of this exploration of friendship in online social networks. Facebook is fun and provides me with many so-called friends, but can it help me be a more ethical person? Should it? Facebook supports improving communication between those in relationships. Until recently relationships received only sporadic attention from philosophers. (Well, recently in philosophical terms, meaning a quarter-century ago—but in social networking terms, this is in ancient pre-history; the year 20 B.F., two decades before Facebook.) Back then, feminist philosophers began refocusing what it means to be moral by placing particular significance on caring relationships. According to care ethicists, caring is the long-overlooked centerpiece of morality.

Traditional approaches to ethics regard rules (like the Ten Commandments) or consequences (think moral cost-benefit analysis) as central. Utilitarianism, as discussed in the previous chapter, is a prime example. This kind of morality judges individual acts as right or wrong and requires us to be impartial. Beginning in the 1980s, feminists argued that rules and consequences are fine, but they do not capture the heart of morality, which is found in the best kinds of relationships we have—partial, caring relationships. Specifically, caring relationships exhibit moral disposition and moral behavior.

When I care about someone, I take a certain posture toward them: I listen to them and want them to know that I will be there for them. When my friend is upset about breaking up with a partner for the twentieth time, I listen intently with interest to comfort them. I use time, energy, and presence whether in person, on the phone, or on a private chat. My attention indicates a disposition that feminist philosopher Nel Noddings describes as “here I am.” Furthermore, I act to demonstrate my caring by tending to their needs in a way that will help them grow and flourish. Changing someone’s diaper or bringing my friend with a hangover a coffee are actions that indicate care. This empathetic response to others is what is referred to as care ethics, a burgeoning field of study. And a somewhat radical one: after all, caring relationships don’t deal much in simple right and wrong, or passing moral judgment on actions and people!

If Facebook, or something like it, is going to be part of how we define friendship in the twenty-first century, then it should be scrutinized the way we examine other methods of relating to one another, and perspective of care ethics seems like a natural fit for asking about ethics and Facebook. Does Facebook facilitate more caring in the world or does it inhibit caring? Or neither?

My Informal Survey

Like a good Facebook member, I decided to survey people on their experience of Facebook. I wanted to confirm my suspicions about Facebook friendships and it seemed appropriate to ask others. My survey is unscientific and my sample set was limited to a hundred anonymous responses garnered from individuals who responded to a posting I placed on listservs.

For the purpose of the survey, I defined a caring relationship as “a rich reciprocal relationship that includes a genuine concern for one another through listening and maintaining a desire for mutual growth and flourishing.” Ninety-six percent of the respondents claimed that they were in a caring relationship, as I defined it, with at least some of their Facebook friends. This is an interesting correlation—it indicates that our sphere of caring overlaps with our Facebook social network. At the very least, we can claim that Facebook has something to do with caring because people seem to have friends on Facebook that they care about.

Next I asked the extent to which Facebook helped respondents care for their friends. Participant reactions were mixed: 35 percent answered “very much so,” 48 percent responded “a little” and 17 percent indicated “not really.” Although I provided a definition of caring, perhaps individual beliefs about caring or the quality and quantity of Facebook use affected perceptions of caring. I did not break out the demographic characteristics of who felt that Facebook contributed to caring, but other existing data indicates that there is generational variation in attitudes toward Facebook in general. Of course, I only polled Facebook users. Ultimately, many, but not all, Facebook members believe that their participation in Facebook contributes to caring for their friends.

I then asked those who had indicated that Facebook facilitates caring (whether very much or just a little) to explain how Facebook helped them care. The responses fall into a number of categories. Many of them cited overcoming distance as the way that Facebook facilitates caring, for example, “A year ago I moved to India, so I feel that Facebook helps me to maintain close relationships with my friends as it facilitates more frequent contact, both in depth and brief exchanges, as well as the ability to share pictures with them so they are still able to literally see me while we have our interactions.”

Another set of responses focused on convenience. A typical answer in this category is “I stay in touch easily with people who are all over the world; things we would email each other about we can do quick updates; some are family, some are friends.” Still others seemed to focus on the ability to communicate day-to-day activities that might otherwise be considered insignificant. For example, “Being able to participate (at least in a small way) in the little things in their daily lives that otherwise I would miss.” Overall, responses to the question of how Facebook facilitates caring almost exclusively mentioned the general communication functions as opposed to any of the entertaining functions; surveys, contests, comparisons, or games. Those bells and whistles are fun, but they don’t seem to be perceived as relevant for a deeper sense of connection and communication necessary for a robust caring relationship.

Finally, I asked if there are ways that Facebook harms users’ caring relationships. Only thirty-five respondents unequivocally found that Facebook has no negative impact on caring. Even fewer, five, gave a straightforward response that Facebook is harmful to caring. A majority, forty-eight, generally found Facebook a positive tool for fostering caring relationships but warned of potentially negative aspects (and twelve people ignored this question altogether). The most common concern voiced was that the convenience of Facebook might prevent them at times from picking up the phone or visiting when they should. Other concerns were too much or inappropriate information shared leading people to care less for someone.

My survey only captured a glimpse of participants’ perception of how they were using Facebook in their relationships. I interpret the responses overall as pointing out the obvious: Facebook is a tool. It has the potential to contribute to caring but can misfire depending on how it is used. The anecdotes about passing on information concerning life’s developments both big and small leads me to consider the epistemological dimension of caring relationships.

New Posts: Care Ethics, Epistemology, and facebook Friendships

One argument for the positive contribution of Facebook to caring relationships is in the transfer of specific concrete information of one another’s lives.

Political theorist Seyla Benhabib distinguishes between the abstract generalized “other” of traditional approaches to ethics and the concrete “other” that feminist care ethics tries to address instead.⁶⁶ The generalized other is an interchangeable and undistinguishable moral agent considered in a rule-based morality, expressed, for example, in a statement like “thou shalt not steal.” This rule requires no particular knowledge of the individual or the circumstances to evaluate the act of stealing as wrong. In this sense, rules are easy to understand. It’s easy for us to judge someone we don’t know as wrong for stealing. It’s harder to make the effort to understand their life and circumstances. It’s difficult to care about the thief.

Care ethics reframes moral considerations to seek knowledge of individuals and their circumstances looking beyond short-term judgment to ongoing connections. Continuing with the stealing example, a hint of a caring approach can be found in the legal term “mitigating circumstances.” Few would consider all stealing equally morally repulsive, as the situation and specific agents involved matter. Perhaps more importantly, care ethics asks that we explore what motivated the theft and what will become of the thief and the victim.

Care does not deny the usefulness of rules nor does it negate the possibility of punishment, but it takes a broader view of morality that entails understanding the situation and individuals involved. The important point is that knowledge is crucial to caring. In a causal chain, knowledge creates the potential for understanding and empathy as well as the possibility of action on behalf of others. This can be described as the affective dimension of care. One cannot care deeply about that for which one does not know. Aboriginal Australians may have severe social or political issues but without knowledge of them, I am unlikely to care or act on their behalf. The more direct my knowledge, for example visiting, or talking with, or living with Aborigines, the greater my opportunity to care and act.

One way to think about online social networks is as a particular form of information repository and transfer system. Because of Facebook, I know my friends’ favorite movies, what Star Trek character they would be, and what they’re making for dinner. The pace of information sharing on Facebook means that some of the information is rich and meaningful but much of it is trivial and only modestly interesting. Facebook has the ability to bring the particularities of one another’s lives into focus. Every fact I learn about someone and what is going on in their life makes them more “real” to me. It’s another opportunity to make a connection and understand them and thus care about them.

This sentiment was repeatedly supported by my informal survey. As one respondent put it, “I am better able to keep in contact with my friends and find out what’s happening in their lives. I believe being able to better communicate is a sign of caring.” Knowledge cannot be a sufficient condition of caring because there are too many variables and complex psycho-social forces, but it is a necessary condition of caring. Facebook facilitates the transfer of interpersonal information that creates connection and connectivity is the foundation of caring.

The information provided to us on Facebook is used to fit into our own narratives of caring and can thus be used to facilitate rich relationships as described above or sometimes it can be used to limit caring. A Facebook friend of mine, a former student who I only maintained a very limited relationship with, recently posted a racist remark on a status comment. Although I could have chosen to engage or confront him about this, given our superficial relationship and the convenience of doing so on Facebook, I dropped him from my friends list. This is an example of me cutting off the potential for care. I could have contacted this student and explored the particulars of his situation and what may have motivated the racist remark with an eye to helping him grasp the implications of such a public comment. Such a response on my part would have demonstrated a greater depth of care for this individual. My point is that although caring always takes effort, Facebook makes it easy for me not to care in some circumstances.

On the other hand, I have friends on Facebook who are politically, religiously, and ethically quite different from me, as declared on their homepage, with whom I maintain a rich online connection. They (and I) post information about our daily lives—weather, pet stories, employment issues, movies enjoyed—that create a connection through our embodied existence on this planet. This connection through communicating life activities does not negate our ideological differences but it reminds us of our shared existence and creates the possibility for caring for one another. This is the hopeful aspect of care ethics that can be facilitated by Facebook: humans can develop a solidarity or connection with one another despite their differences. Perhaps this is the most we can ask in such a richly diverse society.

facebook and a Postmodern Redefinition of Friendship

Facebook may be facilitating a modern alteration of our understanding of friendship categories. Historically (pre-social networking), a binary approach to caring friendship predominated: I care for my close friends and relatives but I have acquaintances for which my caring is very limited. For those I care about, I have and seek more information through increased contact. For those I do not care much about, my knowledge of them is little.

In Britain, such friends were referred to as “nodding acquaintances.” In one sense, Facebook would appear to proliferate such superficial relationships. Facebook is constantly suggesting that we add more and more friends and for some adding friends is akin to a game of popularity. Comedian Steve Hofstetter claims to have over 200,000 Facebook friends, but individuals with hundreds and even thousands of friends are not unusual. Some are critical of this aspect of the social network claiming that they promote artificial friendships among people who may never actually meet in person.

However, the actual use of Facebook indicates that more is going on than just the endless addition of friends. A new mediating category, or perhaps more accurately, a new range of friends are emerging from the use of the social network. The convenience of social networking allows for the exchange of personal information and events that might not have previously occurred among “nodding acquaintances.” A few nights ago I was on Facebook and a former student of mine, who lives a thousand miles away, saw me online and started up a chat. This chat lasted forty-five minutes and reacquainted me with what was going on in her life and her with what was going on in mine. My care and concern for her was recharged. She’s not a close personal family member or friend, but neither is she merely a superficial contact. I was unlikely to write her a long e-mail or letter or pick up the phone and call her. Facebook made a rich interaction possible.

Author and blogger Kate Dailey argues that Facebook contributes to the well being of members through greater connection particularly given how isolating our society can be. For Dailey, social networking empowers acquaintances to contribute to our lives in ways previously reserved only for friends:

Several people in my online network admit that Facebook doesn’t make them a better friend, but a better acquaintance, more likely to dash of a quick happy birthday e-mail, or to comment on the photo of a new puppy. But that’s not a bad thing. Having a large group of “friends” eager to comment on your daily life could be good for your self-esteem.⁶⁷

People I have not seen or talked to in years will sometimes give me a “thumbs up” or write a quick comment to a posting. These acts may be just small affirmations, but they can lead to more if I strike up a deeper communication with them. Even if these acquaintance communications remain limited, they have an accumulator effect. The goodwill expressed may prompt me to positively affirm others on Facebook, but it also might cross over to my relationships outside of cyberspace.

Although Facebook continues to use the popular language of “friend,” the complexity and depth of friendship varies so much that the term seems inadequate to capture the variety of relationships understood under this umbrella term. Postmodernism challenges traditional categories and Facebook may be unwittingly engaging in a postmodern revolution of friendship. Prior to electronic social networks, the maintenance of hundreds of friendships would be a daunting task and even if it were possible the relationships would be largely superficial. The mingling of asynchronicity with instantaneous and constantly available communication and information means that not only can someone maintain a huge cadre of friends, but also at any moment a superficial relationship can become a caring one if both parties choose to engage one another. Through social networking, friendship seems to be entering a postmodern era when the understanding of what constitutes a friend is more fluid than ever before.

Perhaps this is one of the important contributions that Facebook makes to care ethics: a reconsideration of binary distinctions in those we care for. Many of the early formulations of care ethics addressed the “other” (those potentially cared-for) as either friends and family or strangers. Accordingly, those who are friends and family are easier for us to care for (Noddings describes this as “natural caring”) and strangers take more effort to care for (Noddings refers to this as “ethical caring”), thus creating a binary understanding of those who receive care.⁶⁸ The quality and quantity of friendships on Facebook make such a rigid distinction over-simple, even if it were ever true. Care ethics has always emphasized that morality requires a complex response to each situation (rather than a rule or a calculation), but social networks add an additional layer of moral complexity for both theoretical and practical consideration because I cannot easily categorize my Facebook friends. Caring is always a choice we make. If we choose to care it takes time and effort. Facebook can be a magnificent tool for caring but the time and effort required given postmodern reconsiderations of friendship will still be there.

What care ethics can offer Facebook is a reminder that the mechanisms for caring friendships exist outside of cyberspace. I’m not implying that one cannot have rich friendships exclusively in a virtual world, but the physical process of caring must be in place first. Caring is learned through the body in physical interactions that begin at birth. Touch, voice inflection, posture, body comportment, and eye contact all participate in caring interaction that must be developed through muscle memory and the mind. In other words, we learn about caring in ways that we cannot always articulate. However, once we know how to care—holistically and through the body—our imaginative capacity allows us extend that caring to a virtual world such as Facebook.

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Care ethics and Facebook social networking agree that people are fundamentally social. We look around and we see individual bodies and think of people through that individuality. Nevertheless, each person develops and exists in a web of relationships. As some feminist theorists have described, we are all “second persons” rather than first persons—we are more fundamentally the “you”s of those we care for than we are “me”s apart from them—because we can only obtain our identity through social interaction.⁶⁹ Who are we if not for other people? Care ethicists have posited the interconnected nature of individuals as one of the things that traditional ethical approaches, assuming the isolated and detached nature of moral agents, get wrong about human nature. Facebook participation makes us more connected and less isolated. In this sense, the irony of Facebook is that despite its technological underpinnings, it can be described as enhancing our human and interconnected nature.

Facebook and care ethics also share a common goal: valuing and expanding rich relationships. Although Facebook may have commercial underpinnings to its expansion, it nevertheless provides a myriad of ways to add friends and then to develop those relationships through increased information transfer and communication. Care ethicists claim that caring is an overlooked moral voice and that expanding caring relationships can make for a more ethical society. If Facebook, as I have suggested, can be seen as facilitating caring relationships than the resonance of their objectives is apparent.

At the beginning of this chapter I asked whether Facebook could make us more ethical people. Given the ontological and practical congruency of care ethics and Facebook, the answer is, perhaps surprisingly, “Yes.” If caring is as central to morality as some suggest, then Facebook is a means to ethical enrichment as much as any tool of rapid communication and the transfer of personal information can be.

The idea of fostering caring friendships is not a trivial social ideal. Notions that humans are “naturally” antagonistic and warlike contribute to emphasizing the separateness and divisiveness of humanity. Another story, one emphasized by care ethicists, is that humans have much greater capacity to connect with one another, without ignoring our diversity, than has been previously explored. Facebook certainly does not guarantee greater caring in the world, and I am not suggesting that digital relationships, as rich as they are, should replace physical interaction, but Facebook does give us another powerful mechanism for us to explore our caring humanity.