Between friends
On newspaper columnists, Instagram influencers, and why we need to think really hard about the consequences of whether or not we can trust our "friends"
It seems quite likely that one of the anthropological reasons that human beings form friendships is because our hefty brains and extraordinary capacity for language make our knowledge inherently social. We don’t have to know everything if we have ways of communicating with others who have the knowledge we require, and if we trust them to share it faithfully. Friendship is inherently good for putting stakes on the preservation of that trust: Nobody wants to be the friend who lies or even modestly abuses the trust of others.
■ This may be one of the key reasons why the present feels unusually disorienting. In the past, unless your friend happened to be a daily newspaper columnist, you generally had to solicit a specific opinion, ask a particular question, or be in an intentional social environment (like a bar) before you’d know what a friend thought about a subject. You might have had a good guess, but there was generally an aspect of “pull” to finding out.
■ Social media turns that on its head and makes many of those exchanges into “push” relationships: You find out because someone shared a meme on Facebook or posted an update on Snapchat. The algorithms involved push the messages even further, doing nothing to moderate the frequency of what you see according to how close you are to the friend or how much you trust them.
■ Into these feeds is also blended a torrent of material from “parasocial friends“, like celebrities and “influencers”. Many have become quite good at activating the responses of friendship for commercial exploitation.
■ The ability to ask friends and trust the response is why it feels like such a transgression when a purported friend tries to monetize a friendship -- or simply lie. Both violations feel plainly wrong in ordinary life, and yet they happen almost constantly over social media. And it doesn’t have to be an intentional lie to have the same friendship-corroding effects: It’s a very normal experience today to see one too many untruths from an acquaintance, whether it’s a political message untethered from reality or an AI-generated video fake shared by a gullible viewer, and conclude that a “friend” really can’t be trusted.
■ That experience, repeated over and over for years on end, is quite enough to undermine the kind of faith we have always needed to make good use of knowledge as a social enterprise. We don’t know how it will resolve in the future, but we can be sure that it is and will remain consequential for as long as these technologies are around as we know them.
