"What can be more delightful than to have someone to whom you can say everything with the same absolute confidence as to yourself?" Cicero asked in his essay on friendship, written around 44BC. And there are those - Cif contributor Indra Adnan among them - who worry that social networking, and Facebook in particular, is taking away the spontaneity of friendship and debasing that noble ideal. Certainly, few of us can say of all our Facebook friends what Cicero said of his: that mutual friendship sprang from an "inclination of the heart combined with a certain instinctive feeling of love". "Friending" someone (and note the verb: befriending them would be far too Samaritan-like) means something quite different. But does that really debase it?
In truth, Facebook has conventions every bit as rigid as those of the Elizabethan court or the 18th century salon. The site offers friends a limited range of social interactions - gift-giving, joining groups, writing on friends' walls - and enforces them strictly. The social codes are as non-negotiable as anything in Austen. Offenders are threatened with exclusion. A range of conversational topics such as photo albums, bookshelves and Scrabble are imported from the real world for mutual entertainment. And then there is poking.
"When we created the poke, we thought it would be cool to have a feature without any specific purpose," explains Facebook. "People interpret the poke in many different ways, and we encourage you to come up with your own meanings." (That should make an intriguing entry in the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.) But Facebookers soon tire of poking. Many invite their friends to inflict a number of different verbs on them. The result is an anarchic Bacchanalian circus in which friends alternately fondle and throw sheep at each other.
Then there is the relief, for many, of being able to maintain an online identity that is neither Googlable nor purposeful. Bloggers are generally expected to have opinions; social networking demands none. Facebookers can flit from status to status without fear of a stranger demanding why they feel the need to share their thoughts with the rest of the online world. Hecklers are silenced. The social world becomes a delightful playground from which enemies have been banned.
Facebook friendship is a little like the medieval convention of courtly love, and has about as much in common with the outside world. The strict codes and flirtatious little transgressions are partly a reaction to the anonymous heckling that blogging made possible. But mostly Facebook does what sophisticated, privileged societies do: they codify the ways in which humans can play out their friendships. Don't knock it. We've been doing it for thousands of years.