Facebook and Philosophy by D. E. Wittkower

Author:D. E. Wittkower
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Court
Published: 2010-09-29T04:00:00+00:00

12

Care Ethics, Friendship, and facebook

MAURICE HAMINGTON

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.

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