The politics of Facebook friendship: the influence of the social structuration of the SNS upon the notion of the political

Summary/Abstract: This paper deploys Jacques Derrida’s meditations upon the writings of Aristotle in order to suggest a direct relationship between the traditional concept of friendship in European civilization and the Western notions of politics and democracy. It thereby proposes the dependence of the democratic ideal upon the ideal of friendship. Through interviews with researchers and staff at Facebook, and through an empirical experiment which employs a dummy account to monitor the establishment of social relationships through Facebook, the paper suggests that the world’s most popular social networking site is redefining the popular concept of friendship and thereby changing the ideal of friendship upon which the concept of political democracy has traditionally been based. *