Young People in the Digital Age: Metrics of Friendship

This chapter provides a critical overview of the debates on how new developments in the digital age, such as forms of social media, specifically social networking sites, are influencing the social, cultural, and geographical dimensions of young people’s friendships. As a distinctive aspect of young people’s lives, friendships are regarded as sites of companionship, support, and at times intimacy but can also be fraught with anxieties or difficulties. Social networking sites are new technological platforms that exist explicitly to facilitate the practice of friendship. However, there are diverse opinions in both the scholarly and popular literature on the extent to which these sites and other forms of social media are transforming the nature and meaning of contemporary friendship. A range of commentators also debate in sometimes quite polarizing terms whether the net effects of these new social media are positive and negative. This chapter explores how social media practices shape friendship for young people and argues that it is unproductive to take a binaristic view of the effects of social media as young people in the digital age are diverse in the ways they “do” friendship and in the ways they mobilize newer social resources that have opened up to them.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-026-1