8 - The demise of territorial determinism: online friendships

Summary

New social forms and processes emerge and old ones change and sometimes disappear with technological change. In this chapter, I consider the state of development of transportation and communications technologies as a context for the structure and content friendship. The focus of this discussion is therefore on how technology affects relationships, rather than on how society shapes technology (see Meyrowitz, 1985, for a discussion of the latter topic). None the less, the position taken here is not technologically deterministic (see McLuhan, 1964, and Innis, 1951, for examples of this approach), but rather social constructivist. Participants use technology to form and maintain friendships and, as a consequence, encourage technology to develop in ways that serve this purpose (see Couch, 1989, 1990, for an examination of the role of human agency in using technology for relationship work). This chapter is focused on the social construction of relationships instead of on the social construction of technology, and thus the discussion considers only one side of the process. For the purposes here, the question of technological versus social determinism is inconsequential, because technological determinists, social constructivists, and those who see technology and society as dialectically interdependent (e.g., Castells, 1996) agree that social relationships are different depending on the technological context in which they are formed and maintained. Of interest here is how friendships might be different now and in the future than they were 200 years ago, before the recent, rapid developments in communications and transportation technology.

Research has repeatedly verified Homans's (1950) proposition that increased interaction leads to increased liking (e.g., Hays, 1984, 1985).