The Syndication of the ‘Friend’ in the Ethics of the Web
How the Past Decade of Online Living Has Changed Human Conceptions of Friendship
This article was originally published on Wonk Bridge
Syndication
noun: syndication; plural noun: syndications
The transfer of something for control or management by a group of individuals or organizations.
- “the syndication of assets to investors”
There is something unsatisfying about the definitions of certain key words in our language (and I don’t just mean English). In linguistic terms, while some words — like ‘syndication’ above — don’t much molest their intensional definitions[1], meaning the same thing roughly to everybody, others agitate against the confines of the meanings given to them. We look at certain words, and while we’re sure enough what they pertain to, finding a single concrete meaning that satisfies all parties to it is a challenge. One example of such a word is ‘friend’. On a page of Quora Questions (that dependable bellweather of human interest), the question “What is friendship? What is a friend?” has racked up 154 answers at the time of publishing. Seems as though everybody knows what a friend is, but nobody knows what…
