Why Twitter is good for friendships

What keeps good friends together? Aristotle suggested that there are three foundations that friendships can be built upon. These foundations are virtue and goodness, pleasure, and usefulness. If you consider the first foundation in the context of modern relationships, then it can be translated to mean the sharing of values.

These values can be religious, political, or any commonality that overlaps both friends. The value that is particularly prominent is that of shared topical interests (sports, work, passions etc.) and many conversations between friends are usually based on these. These conversations include observations, analyses and introduction of new aspects to these interests to the other parties.

Twitter serves as an augmentation channel in that it allows for information exchange between friends. Studies have shown that strong tie connections aren’t very economical in terms of new information exchange because you will usually know many of the things that your strong peers know (because you share many of the same nodes in your network). Twitter alleviates this if you and your friends each follow different accounts that preclude homophily.

Thus any new information that is gained by either party can easily be disseminated among friends that share the same interest and strengthen that connection (using that shared value as a pipe) in the process. Additionally, because this type of behaviour and sharing is useful to both parties, under Aristotle’s theory, it satisfies two of the three conditions for friendship relationship building.

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