Has the Internet Made Friendship Harder? Not Really — But Modern Friendship Plays More Like a Trial-and-Error Game | 100 Big Questions About Life

Internet friendship isn't just the online edition of offline friendship. It has grown a system of its own.

Ever since the phone became a daily necessity, almost any kind of relationship can lean on the network to exist. A stranger you have never met may have been calling you "brother" or "sister" in some product-recommendation thread yesterday; the owner of the corner shop downstairs may be the Alipay contact you exchange the most money with; a classmate you haven't spoken to in ten years may be lurking silently in one of your WeChat groups. In an internet age where everyone's business is within earshot of everyone else, "finding a person and getting to know them" has never been easier. From that angle, the network has made the distance between people a little "shorter."

Sociologists say friendship needs three ingredients: physical proximity, repeated unplanned contact, and chances to talk with your guard down. Offline friendship carries a heavier load of social obligation, so it usually grows out of an existing tie — classmates, coworkers. Internet friendship no longer obeys that rule. Physical distance is basically a non-issue, and taking a position on things has become the one prerequisite for making a friend. Offline you can let your surroundings find your friends for you; on a phone you can't signal goodwill without emoji and "hahaha." With no body in the room, words and gestures have to stand in for it — the old line, "You are what you say."

The network holds everyone's likes, dislikes, leanings and opinions; sort and select from them and you have a virtual personality ready to run. "You share n hobbies," "you agree on xx issues," "you both blocked so-and-so" — these really can produce the feeling that we're kindred spirits. But moving self-expression from offline to online always costs something in loss and distortion. Selfies can be retouched, Moments can be hidden from certain people, updates can be shown group by group; manage it well and anyone can hide in plain sight, letting different people in different places know different things.

On that foundation, this new form of friendship sets plenty of new tests. There are too many things online to have a position on — so many that "one moment you spot something admirable in a person and warm to them, the next you read another remark of theirs and the spell breaks." If nearly everything the other person says suits you, except for the one thing that crosses your line, does the friendship go on? Or, to be blunter about it: if a friendship lives only online, with no offline overlap holding it down, is it easier to walk away from, precisely because it never cost you much?

A recent buzzword sums up the situation: "clubbing-style socializing." The idea is that social scenes work like nightclubs and our goal is to hit every venue. It looks crowded and lively, but for most people the relationship never leaves the cheap, "daily-disposable" stage. The Conversation made much the same point in an article: the old social etiquette ran on a single thread, like a one-on-one conversation face to face — whatever the other person asked, you answered on the spot, and saying nothing or walking out cost you a lot. Then instant messaging that requires no meeting tore up that so-called contract. You can talk to many people at once, and you can unfollow, block or uninstall on a whim. Ignoring people and leaving things hanging is now normal, with almost no visible consequence to bear.

In an earlier report we set out the many problems intimate relationships can run into under social networks. Treat friendship as a kind of intimate relationship and you will find it stuck in much the same places: the old "social etiquette" is coming apart, and no new rules have set in its place ("rules" is only a convenient word — whether they deserve the name is itself arguable). The "strong ties" of one workplace for life and the same neighbors for decades are no longer a necessity; lightweight relationships are the mainstream. Behind the network cable everyone is equal. Nobody can stop you from playing dead on WeChat, just as you have no way to order anyone (other than a subordinate) to answer you within 30 seconds.

So has the internet made human relationships "plastic"? It does seem… a bit that way. But friendship has always been a projection of the self and a way of shoring it up, and if the network hadn't shown us a glimpse of this brave new world of endless possibilities, we wouldn't even get the chance to let loose in this easy, error-tolerant "clubbing-style socializing." However thin online friendship runs, it still fits people today better than the traditional virtues of passing cigarettes around and drinking each other under the table.

What Hurdles Do We Hit Before Becoming Friends Today?

Combining two polls QDaily Research Lab ran earlier — "Social Etiquette We Can't Manage" and "How to Avoid Being a Taker in Socializing" — we found that two people who want to become friends online first have to clear the following eight small, argument-prone problems:

1. When you're chatting with a friend, do you have to reply at once?

In our survey, 19% of people said that when chatting with someone, they can't actually manage to "reply as soon as possible." Replying at once looks like a small thing, but the delicate feelings it stirs up are surprisingly many. For example:

• If I reply instantly, will they think I'm a bit too keen?
• They took 10 minutes to send back one word — should I wait 20 minutes before replying?
• Sometimes, to hide the fact that I'm free, I try to hold the reply back a while, and then forget the whole thing.

Other readers said an instant reply gives the other person real reassurance, or at least spares them needless anxiety and worry. So even if replying at once doesn't decide much about a friendship, it will at least steer your mood for a moment.

2. How close do you have to be before you can send voice messages?

On "sending voice messages," Quartz argued in a report last year that the habit reveals unequal standing between the two people in a conversation, because the gesture assumes the sender has the right to cause you a small but real inconvenience. You can of course claim that when a friendship is solid enough you wouldn't mind even a 60-second voice message. But when does a friendship count as solid enough? If the other person thinks you're already on voice-message terms and you don't (research says humans are bad at telling whether a friendship runs both ways — 47% of the time it's one-sided wishful thinking), then what?

Other behavior that can make a friendship feel unequal:

• You type out a long paragraph and get back a single "huh."
• You want to talk about something serious and they keep answering with stickers.
• You're busy with work and they start a video or voice call with no warning.
• After a get-together you post the group photo and they post nothing at all.

3. Someone you barely know follows your personal social media account. Do you follow back?

You have probably run into this often: someone follows your account and tells you so, hoping to be followed back, but you take a look and find you're not really interested — and yet, to save face, you feel you have to follow anyway. The result is just "one more person on my mute list."

4. Someone you rather like posts something you can't stand. Do you unfollow?

The upgraded version of the last awkwardness. After a while of quietly checking each other out, you've decided the two of you agree on most things and are well on the way to becoming close friends. Then one day one of their posts steps straight on a nerve — the kind you can't let pass. What follows isn't only the surprise and disappointment of "I never thought they'd be like this," but the bind of "my good opinion of them can't survive this, yet unfollowing over one post looks petty."

5. Halfway through a chat with a good friend, can you just stop replying?

One of the signature irritations of the instant-messaging era: partway through a conversation one side has something to do, or nothing left to say, so they simply stop answering, and only open a new discussion later when a new topic turns up.

For people used to come-and-go conversation, this may mean "I don't treat you as an outsider." For people used to saying goodbye before they leave, the feeling of someone vanishing mid-sentence is roughly the online version of "next time / another day / when I'm free," and it doesn't feel good.

Similar scenes:

• They say "you there?" and then go quiet, and you can't tell whether to type a reply or just fire back a question mark.
• Sometimes you can't be bothered to keep talking either, so you stop replying too.
• They raise a topic and disappear; you know they may genuinely be busy, but it still grates, so you delete the whole thread.
• You notice their status is "read, no reply," and think being left "unread" would actually feel better.
• You send several messages and they answer only one of them, and you can't tell whether that's deliberate or absent-minded.
• You sense the chat drifting into small talk for its own sake, so you say goodbye first and end it early — at least it gets a proper ending.

6. Sharing things like "help me haggle this price down / give me a like / revive me in this game" — does that drain a friendship?

In our lab's poll "Which Kind of Sharing Feels Like It Drains a Friendship?", a good number of people felt that "like my top post in Moments," "who-unfriended-you test links" and "I've been having relationship trouble, blah blah blah" all amount to overspending social currency, and can easily break a friendship. Others disagreed: as long as it's a friend, "sharing or venting, I'm glad to take it." The reasons for taking it differ under scrutiny. It may be that being confided in makes you feel trusted and relied on, so you enjoy it. Or you may not like it at all, and tolerate it only because "friends shouldn't keep score on things like this."

7. Plenty to say online, but each of you on your own phone when you meet. Does that count as being close?

Judging by how often it happens, looking at your phone instead of the person in front of you — "phubbing," phone plus snubbing — is now so normal that it "doesn't even work as a joke," and the people most often phubbed are exactly one's partners, close friends and ordinary friends. So if two people get on beautifully online but the moment they meet it turns into "happy to be on our phones together", does that show you're close enough not to worry about each other's feelings, or that the air is so cold you have to pick up a phone to cover it? (By the way, in another survey, 22% of partners felt phubbing lowers closeness in a relationship. Among ordinary friends, the share who dislike it probably isn't much lower.)

8. If you get on well online, is there any need to meet offline?

This may be the question every friendship has to face eventually: does it step into real life?

In our lab's open survey "How to Keep a Long-Term Friendship", the answer that drew the most agreement was "you have to get involved in the other person's life." In the discussion "How Old Friends Drift Apart", the top answer was "studying and working in different places, and slowly growing distant." And "The Subtle Types of Friend on Social Networks" includes a type who is "a friend to the death online, and 'who are you?' in person." There seems no denying it: whatever the human relationship, however ideal it looks online, it seems to need to reach into real space before you feel "I really do know this person."

After these eight questions you may think making friends shouldn't take this much thinking, that it's too much trouble. But even if only for the decency and goodwill of "being aware that other people exist, and going as far as minding how they feel", you have reason not to let these questions become needless obstacles on your way to a friendship.

The 10 Levels of Internet Friendship: Which Stage Are You At?

Taking our cue from Jezebel's "Five Stages of Intimacy", we've put together a chart of internet friendship levels. Test yourself against it.

One note before you do: these ten levels are only one of the many online shapes a friendship can take, and there's a good chance they're out of step with how you get on offline. You can read it alongside the original offline version:

Cover image and illustrations by Zheng Shuya