What makes a person a friend? Is it – as Oscar Wilde put it – someone who ‘stabs you in the front’? Someone who’ll tell you truths that you need to hear, perhaps, and someone who’ll love you, foibles and all? Maybe they’ll share your values, tastes and sense of humour. A good pal can be all those things and more. Yet, even when you have all that, friends are still messy. They let you down. They have opinions you hate. They’re irritating. They’re too loud or too clingy. They disappear when you need them and reappear when you don’t.
With all that in mind, it’s not surprising that making contacts online is an increasingly common experience. The internet can provide friendships without the mess – and during the pandemic, web-based applications became a lifeline for making and maintaining connections with others. Social-mediabased or other online relationships are often not seen as real. However, philosopher Rebecca Roache disputes that. ‘There’s a pervasive anxiety that true friendship is in decline, and that technology is to blame,’ she writes in an article on the BBC website. She thinks that this scepticism is biased: ‘It is, after all, often expressed by people whose early friendships were not formed around social media, which may make them more likely to ignore the positives.’