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Ethics and Information Technology

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01-12-2014 | Original Paper

Excellent online friendships: an Aristotelian defense of social media

Author: Alexis Elder

Published in: Ethics and Information Technology | Issue 4/2014

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Abstract

I defend social media’s potential to support Aristotelian virtue friendship against a variety of objections. I begin with Aristotle’s claim that the foundation of the best friendships is a shared life. Friends share the distinctively human and valuable components of their lives, especially reasoning together by sharing conversation and thoughts, and communal engagement in valued activities. Although some have charged that shared living is not possible between friends who interact through digital social media, I argue that social media preserves the relevantly human and valuable portions of life, especially reasoning, play, and exchange of ideas. I then consider several criticisms of social media’s potential to host friendships, and refute or weaken the force of these objections, using this conception of a distinctively human shared life. I conclude that we should use the shared life to evaluate features of social media and norms for users’ conduct.

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I thank Kai Kimppa for raising this point.

Thanks to Tobias Matzner for raising this objection, and for a fruitful discussion of possible responses.

The documentary Generation Like (Rushkoff, D. (Director), Public Broadcasting Service, 2014) vividly portrays some of the problematic situations that can arise between underage users and commercial social media providers.

Thanks to Olli Heimo for raising this question.

Thanks to Erica Neely for bringing up several issues about relationship dynamics online, which inspired this and the following section.

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Title: Excellent online friendships: an Aristotelian defense of social media
Author: Alexis Elder
Publication date: 01-12-2014
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Published in: Ethics and Information Technology / Issue 4/2014
Print ISSN: 1388-1957
Electronic ISSN: 1572-8439
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-014-9354-5

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