#2 On Friends and Mindapples from battlecat on Vimeo.

My latest vodcast – as recorded on May 29th, 2009.

I only just realised that I could have included links to bands, projects and friends using the amazing power of titles.

Oh well.

My friend Marc, is the writer behind http://www.un-understand.co.uk.
The Australian band I mentioned was Brillig http://www.brillig.com.au.
And my friend Andy Gibson http://sociability.org.uk is the founder of Mindapples http://mindapples.org!

This week I’m overwhelmed with visits by half a dozen lovely people primarily from Adelaide band Brillig. It’s an absolute pleasure to be showing the first arrivals, Matt and Elizabeth around my new city.

I’m almost shaking with excitement for Thursday when some of my most absolute favourite people in the entire world come to visit. I think I’ll need to visit some more fotoautomats so that I can record their visits too!

As part of this learning I’ve started listening to a series of short lectures by  Mark Vernon, author of The Philosophy of Friendship, recounting and responding to Aristotle’s philosophy of friendship.

In Lecture 3, Vernon elaborates on Aristotle’s idea of 3 types of friendship: Useful,Pleasant and Good friends.  A lovely Australian friend, the zinestress extraordinaire  Maddy Phelan, describes these relationships as Situational (school / work), Activity (music, hobby) and Excellent (life long friends) friendships.  You meet most of your friends at work, school or in situations around your hobbies and passions, but not all of those friendships will last once those situations change. The friends who last despite life changes, are your Good or Excellent friends.

Before listening to these lectures, I’d already begun thinking of people I know as belonging to those categories. It prompts a series of questions: Why do some people stay friends while others drift away? Is this drifting something you can predict? How do you know when someone’s become an Excellent friend? Do you need a life change (new employment, travel) to really find out which friendships will survive? Do you need to share specific experiences / spend a certain amount of time with someone to strengthen and form a long-lasting friendship?

Mark Vernon describes Aristotle’s Good / Excellent friends as people you love for what they are or who they are in themselves. They’re the people you are friends with because of their “depth of character, goodness, passion or joie de vivre”.

As a personal exercise as part of 150 Things I asked myself to write a list of my most Excellent friends. I ended up with 7 people who I feel are my truest soul friends – people who I’ll continue to be friends with for the rest of my life, even if I only see them every few years. These are the friends I know intimately and who refresh my sense of self and personal energy whenever I see them.

I also made a list of about 15-20 people who might be in that Excellent friend category if I could have enough chances to spend time / communicate with them and develop a friendship further.  Luckily several of those people live here in Berlin. After only five months living in this town I feel very happy and lucky knowing that I have potential Excellent friends.

“The better these friends are as people, the better the quality of the friendship. This friendship is therefore also the rarest. And it takes time to grow: they must savour salt together, Aristotle says, and trust one another…

…What is quick to arrive is a wish for friendship – what is not quick to rise is friendship itself.”
Mark Vernon,

*To tangent away from friendship itself, I want to add that the social networking sites I feel most comfortable with and trust more as brands are those which are more honest about the type of connection / relationship that is being made: Do you want to follow person x? (Twitter) or Do you want to add this person as a Conact? Are they a Friend or Family member? (Flickr)

For me, the phrasing of the questions also encourages me to think more about the type of information I’ll share with members of those social networks. Facebook seems to encourages people to share far more information online by the use of the word ‘friend’ to describe contact: “of course I’ll share my home address with this person who I’ve met once – they’re my ‘friend’”.

I think that I’m most interested in the ‘betweenness’ of two people becoming friends and one of the topics I wish to explore is how a developing friendship is acknowledged: how do they negotiate and acknowledge that transition, what level of formality is assumed, are there cultural associations marking the transition of friendship?

To elaborate on this point, I’ll paraphrase my Quebecois flatmate:

How many of your Facebook friends do you kiss [on the cheek]?

I have close friends in all of the places I lived who I hug or kiss upon greeting, but from my perspective that is not part of my formal culture as it is for other, particularly French speaking people.

At a language level does the shift from the formal to informal pronoun (vous/ tu in French, Sie, du in German) happen before, at a similar time or after the cheek kissing? I have a feeling that traditionally, language shifts would have been a more important signifier of intimacy in Europe, but what about with languages such as Japanese of Korean?

I’m interested in exploring this cultural friendship marker further, at some point after first meeting, two people decide that they are now “kissing friends”. What type of developments and conversations happen to encourage that transition? At what level of intimacy and shared personal histories does this happen? Are most people unaware of this transition or do they make a conscious decision to move a friendship forward?

This article from the Psychology Today website that has really helped me focus some of my thoughts about the process of how we become friends. I’d particularly like to get hold of a book by Beverly Pehr called Friendship Processes which is mentioned in the article and unavailable in Berlin libraries.

If you’d like to support my DIYMasters you can make a donation, or you could buy Friendship Processes or another item from my Amazon wishlist.

What happens if you begin to think about tying string to moments and people? (from the Heroes wiki - http://heroeswiki.com)

A slightly trivial example is that I was listening to an In Our Time podcast on the history of Heat the other day and my immediate response was “XKCD!”

There have been moments when the potential world of knowledge seems to concurrently shrink and expand as I make connections between seemingly disparate topics such as a war in Congo being related to minerals running out. A connection is made, but it opens up so many more questions and things to learn.

Other people are thinking this way and are developing tools with which to record these connections. We can connect the people we know in networked graphs and record similarities between musical artists. We can draw mindmaps on pieces of paper, or represent them visually through software like The Brain or connect topics with tags as on delicious.

But how can we make and represent these connections in the real world?

When I meet a person who has a similar interest to someone I already know, I immediately want to introduce them so that they can benefit from their ideas.

That’s one way of making a connection, but besides that introduction being recorded by electronic social media such as Facebook how could these connections (and their history) be recorded and ‘tagged’ physically?

I guess part of this thought comes from a fear/worry that if the internet suddenly ceased to exist I would have no connection to the 450+ people I am connected to on Facebook.

If that situation occurred, would I really care? Are all relationships meaningful enough to be recorded in the real world?

Should I tie thousands of kilometres of string to the people I care about and am interested in, or do I take a photo? Should I send 471 postcards a day letting people know my status, and would they send a postcard back?

To that end, for 150 Things I’m thinking a lot about making tangible tokens as a way of recording the relationships I have with people.

Jasmine tea has always been important to me when living overseas. My odd penchant for cold and wet places means that I keep on missing out on important stuff like sun and flowers. One of the ways I’ve got over that is by drinking jasmine tea, closing my eyes and thinking about Adelaide.

I think that one of the reasons why I’ve begun to focus on friendship is that it actively draws my mind back to people I care about. I have a strong academic and creative interest in the theory of friendship which is very important in motivating me to explore the area. But there is also the payback of regularly acknowledging the presence of the people I know, whether they are my most intimate friends or people I used to serve beer to.

I’ve been thinking that in a community with a size of 150 (commonly cited as Dunbar’s Number), not all of those people will be friends.

Even though I have a Facebook friend list of over 450 people I wanted to see if I could quickly name 150 people who I wanted to actively maintain, create or repair friendships with. I gave myself a limit of about half an hour to make the list.

Some limits:

• I didn’t look at Facebook.
• Family members and “romantic” partners were eligible.
• I had to have met people ITRW.
• People on the list had to be alive.

At the end of half-an-hour I had 89 people on the list. Compared to my Facebook friends, that’s not that many people.

The vast majority of people were between the ages of 23 and 40. I felt a little sad that I don’t have that much interaction with much older or much younger people. In the future I want to return to this topic as I feel age range is an important element of community.

Only two people on the list were from Berlin and I’ve known them for longer than the two months I’ve been here. I think that’s a sign of how friendships evolve – there are some lovely people who I like in Berlin, but I’m still not sure if they’re going to become friends.

I intend to repeat this exercise in the future so that I can compare how people drift in and out of the list. I won’t compare the lists until I’ve done several.

For a few reasons I won’t reveal the list:

• Even though I’m consciously and publicly thinking about friends – they are still personal relationships.
• I feel weird about listing people’s names on the internet without their permission.
• I don’t want awareness of whether someone’s on the list or not to alter their behaviour and our friendship.
• Future Things may be dependent on the secrecy of the list.

Prompted by: the Love / Hate lists I wrote in diaries in primary school.

For a while I was feeling intimidated that I would have to set myself “assignments”, whether I had to create  an electronic friend “sensor”, a film or a sculpture made out of marshmallows and toothpicks.  Instead I’m giving myself permission to do small exploratory actions and reminding myself that anything, no matter how tiny it is contributes towards a body of work.

So I’m setting myself the rather grand task of recording 150 things that I create and do during this informal study of friendship.  I’ve chosen the number 150 because it is commonly cited as Dunbar’s Number, or the upper end of group sizes in which people maintain stable relationships with each other.  Of course how many of those people we count as true friends is probably much smaller, so it’ll be interesting to see how many of the 150 “things” are significant pieces of work.

So that I don’t start off with a feeling of being overwhelmed at doing the first Thing, I’m going to list my BarCampSheffield talk on friendship as the number one action.

Impressively, there happens to be a copy of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus beside my beau’s bed*.  Last night while waiting for dinner to cook (roast chicken pieces with vegetable risotto and salad), I made my way through most of the introduction.

As a result of my first foray into Deleuze my head is currently abuzz with rhizomes and how nicely the concept ties in with the graphical representation of relationships and their tangly nature. An integral quality of rhizomic forms is that a node can be removed, but the rhizome still exists as a entitity despite being altered.

I guess that one of the things that is drawing me to explore concepts of friendship is that I have a tendency to cut myself out of a localised friendship group and to then propagate new networks once I reach a new town. There’s a strange sensation of feeling a very strong tie to the older and more established rhizomes of friendship even when you are part of a new structure / waiting for a new one to grow of and towards you.

Today especially, I’m feeling the drain of not having an immediate and close connection to many established friends and colleagues. Language differences are a little overwhelming and the cold of Berlin encourages me to make connections between trying to grow plants in winter and the challenge of meeting people and feeling at home in a new town.

[I'm not sure how I'm meant to play with these concepts, thoughts and connections, but I'm sure I'm meant to be doing something with them.]

*I’ve been assured that my beau has actually been reading the book and doesn’t store it there [just] to impress the ladies.

The theme for my first ever Bar Camp this past weekend in Sheffield was “community and conversation.”  Conveniently, most of the people in Sheffield I wanted to catch up with or get to know better were at Bar Camp. Even better, one of my best friends from Adelaide and another friend were down from Newcastle Upon Tyne for the weekend.

Since I was returning to a place where I’d briefly lived yet made a number of great connections, it felt fitting to run a session on friendship and how to move to a new town.

My original title for this session was going to be How to move to a new place, make friends and influence people. On arrival at Bar Camp Sheffield I realised that I wanted my session to be more than a presentation: how could I get people to turn up and talk about how we meet, become friends and influence each other? So I cunningly threw in a Star Wars related title.

My suspicions about who turns up at Bar Camps were justified! There was a crowd of geeks… Then, without notes or a sequence of events I had to run my session.

I’d initially thought about running this as a presentation complete with slides and er, planning, but I wanted to play with the unconference environment of Bar Camp and in the end settled for a more impromptu conversation-like session which I tried to direct with some questions.  I felt that it was a style of discussion that worked particularly well with the topic.

As a result, my slightly disjointed notes are from memory.  I’ve tried to record key elements of what I said, what I wish I’d said and how other people responded.  If you have a better memory and can tell me something I forgot, or have something that you wish you’d had a chance to mention on Saturday, please leave a comment below.

It was a great experience for my first ever BarCamp – I’m looking forward to seeing how future events shape up in comparison (free beer and food?!). Thanks so much to Jag, Ian, Jay and Josie for organising such a lovely weekend!

I want to explore the nuances of friendship and the distinctions between strangers, acquaintances and friends.  I’m not yet sure whether to do this as artistic practice or to follow it academically or professionally.

Inspiration:

• Futuresonic ’08 – Matt Jones of Dopplr “Kill ‘Friending’ and the binary recording of relationships”
  • Started me thinking about the nuances of friendship – online we click a button to say Yes, we’re friends, but how do we recognise and acknowledge friends in real life? What are the qualities we look for, how do we ‘know’ that person x is a friend?
• James Boardwell’s talk at GeekUp Sheffield (July ’08) on “internet sensibilities: remodelling humans”.
  • A couple of slides in particular grabbed my attention – the comparison of the way teenagers record degrees of friendship. Girls did this very consciously and frequently with people they knew moving in and out of a layers / circles of friendship.
• Moving from city to city – I’m able to socialise easily and know many people I count as friends around the world (NB: friends here implies various levels of intimacy and “bestness”). I now seem to have an innate ability to start interacting with anyone of any age – but can I do make even better connections with people?
  • When thinking of this event I was wondering what techniques other people used when interacting with others, especially in new cities with unfamiliar languages and cultural conventions.

Things I Remember Saying, Questions I Remember Asking:

• How I became social: When I was 18 my boyfriend Ringo gave me detailed instructions on how to start talking to people. “Compliment them on their clothes, make a comment about something nearby and then ask them questions about themselves”.
• How does one know when they are friends with someone?
  Possibly because they are traditionally associated with economic obligations, I feel that romantic relationships and business relationships have a formality associated with them that isn’t just about marriage and business contracts. First kisses and handshakes are an “informal” way of starting something.
• Could there be a biochemical and therefore evolutionary reason for why we’re friends with some people and not with others?
  I’m particularly interested in this – how come we just don’t get on with some people who have many similarities and shared interests with us?
• Do other people find it difficult to stop being friends with other people?
  Are friend ‘breakups’ as codified and formal as those with romantic / sexual partners or with business relationships?
• Do friends expect certain behaviour from each other?  Eg. in a romantic relationship there’s usually many conditions – you shall not kiss / touch / flirt / have sex with another person.
  Interestingly the major problems I’ve had with friends have been when I’ve broken some type of friendship condition that I was unaware of.
• If we can become “friends” so easily online – why are we now unable to talk with our immediate community of neighbours?
  Someone whose name I never caught mentioned that when he moved to a new house he left cards with his immediate neighbours and felt that that action actually reduced the interaction he had with them.
• Does anyone else find public transport an amazing place to meet people?
  General consensus: Yes, but not on the Tube.  Lucy from SY was very happy to admit to being the crazy talkative lady on the bus. (Go Girl!)

I Remember Other People Talking About:

• Guy Dickinson talked about how his grandmother had been remembered as being a good friend.  He thought it was primarily to do with the fact that she rarely talked – most of the time she was listening to other people.
• GD – very conscious use of “social skills” (i.e. that done by salespeople) would often put him off talking to them.
• GD – Fine line between Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and people who are naturally good at interaction and who make eye contact, ask questions etc without it being an act.  (further reading: The Game by Neil Strauss)
• GD – Differences in business behaviour across cultures eg. US far more overtly “networked” with cards and working out who was known in common. In France meetings more likely to start with general conversation so that those involved had developed some deeper connection than just business.
• Dan Donald – talked about how there are layers of friendship. Some people you can see once every couple of years and still be amazingly close. Other people can be around you every day but still not be a friend.
• DD – mentioned the book The Politics of Experience by RD Laing and in particular how it discusses the ways we interact with other people.
• Social Networking
  Inevitably this discussion turned away from traditional friendship and mutated into a talk about social networks and online reputations.
  • GD – had for a while made sure he was the only Guy Dickinson up the top of Google.
    Also he felt that his daughter used Bebo in a different way to Facebook as she was ‘friends’ with him on one social network and not the other.
  • Emma Persky spoke at length about how she uses different social networks depending on how she knows people.
    She uses Linked In to manage connections with people she knows professionally and from conferences and  Facebook for connections with ‘real’ friends. Uses Twitter to follow anyone she’s interested in regardless of whether they’ve met before.
    Has two business cards – a professional one courtesy of her employer and a personal Moo card.
    Interestingly she’s happy to share a lot of personal details such as address via the web implying a large amount of trust in social networks.
• Lucy and Emma from Screen Yorkshire were also active participants, especially about offline relationships.
• Lucy mentioned that she has can maintain a limited number of friends.
  This led to talking about the Dunbar’s Number and whether it had changed, relative to the speed with which we can keep in contact with people.
• The reference to Dunbar’s Number also tied in with Malcolm Gladwell’s book “The Tipping Point”

Things I wish I’d mentioned

• I still feel guilty if I give someone “best friend” status – it’s like I take the word very literally and can only have one very close friend at any one time. Taking the Dunbar Number and limits of socialising into consideration, is it possible to have many very close and good friends?
• Love / Hate lists in primary school. Way back before social networks or even the web existed my school friends and I used to keep lists of who we liked and who were our sworn enemies and would move them in and out as they changed status.
• I really like how Flickr connections are recorded by default as ‘contacts’ and that being recorded as a friend or family requires a separate click.
  For a while Facebook made it compulsory to list how you knew someone and that had to be confirmed by the other person. Did this classification of ‘friend’ annoy people?
• Learning how to talk to dogs in different languages is important – it’s a great way of meeting people.
  • For the record the German for ‘sit’ is sitz and in Finnish it’s istu - Can you help me out with any other languages?

Further Reading:

• Derrida – The Politics of Friendship.  I only just found out about this today. It’s on my wishlist if anyone wants to gift me, but I’m not exactly looking forward to reading an entire book written by Derrida.
• Malcolm Gladwell – The Tipping Point. A great book which introduced me to Dunbar’s Number and social roles like connectors and mavens.
• Just found online: Is a Social Media Friend Really a Friend?

UPDATES:

• I recently spoke with someone about this topic and they mentioned that children are always actively making and breaking up with their friends. The woman I was speaking with had worked in a primary school and had noticed that as children they were very contract-minded about why they would stop being friends with each other. eg. “Mark wouldn’t share his candy with me! He’s my best friend and best friends always share candy.”
  Why and when does this outlining of what you expect from your friends become more unspoken?
• I’ve also just read the most amazing article which references a book called Friendship Processes by Beverley Fehr:
  

  With intriguing accuracy, sociologists and psychologists have delineated the forces that attract and bind friends to each other, beginning with the transition from acquaintanceship to friendship. They’ve traced the patterns of intimacy that emerge between friends and deduced the once ineffable “something” that elevates a friend to the vaunted status of “best.”

  Friendship: The Laws of Attraction, Why Some (And Only Some) Friends Stick

• I’m still overwhelmed by how many people I’d met in the three months I spent living in Sheffield and how enjoyable it was to catch up with them as well as meet new people at BarCamp.
  Revisiting Sheffield has really helped to reassure me that I’ll make as good a circle of friends in Berlin given enough time. I’ll report back on my progress at BarCampSheff 3.0!

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