Love and Friendship

Love and Friendship Performance-Based Task

Part One: Anchor Source Directions: Analyze the articleon the 4thand 5th slides by taking notes using the Cornell Note Taking method and answering several comprehension questions.

Cornell Notes Step 1: Notes Take notes on the text and gather facts about the topic. Step 2: Questions Anticipate Quiz questions that would prompt the notes you took. Step 3: Summary Write a summary of the text.

Facebook changing the meaning of friendship John Przybys, Las Vegas Review Journal, January 30, 2011 How many friends do you have? 50? 100? 500? For Facebook fans, the answer can be found in the box in the left-hand column of their home pages. But how many of those people represented by the tiny photos -- or, for the new, tech averse or lazy, that silly silhouette -- would loan you a couple of hundred bucks? Take the time to comfort you after a romantic breakup? Check in on you when you're sick? With all the cool things Facebook and other social media sites let us do -- reconnect with people we haven't seen in ages, share vacation photos with everybody we know, vent our frustrations du jour to everybody within cyber-earshot -- they've also done something linguistically unexpected. They've changed -- or, critics would say, diluted -- the meaning of "friend" in ways poets couldn't have imagined. It's not surprising, though. Julian Kilker, an associate professor of journalism and media studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who studies emerging techologies, notes that technology often tends to alter the meanings of words it touches. "There's a long history of terms sort of being modified by technology, particularly electronic technology," Kilker says. "The word 'community' is one of those examples. The notion of 'community' has shifted. Initially, we had to preface 'community' with 'online' -- for example, saying, 'my online community.' " Such shifts in words' meanings do, Kilker adds, make sociologists "a little frustrated." "Community" for instance, once required "co-location, that you had to be in the same place," he explains. Now the meaning of the word "has morphed slightly, at least in the popular sense, to include connection in a virtual environment. "I think the same thing is happening with 'friend' right now. Our notion of what a 'friend' is is shifting, and I think if you talk to people of different demographics -- particularly different ages -- you'll find, if you ask them the definition of 'friend,' they have very different notions of that." Does the mishmash of friend-friends, casual friends, work friends, friends of friends and friend-seeking strangers gathered on the typical Facebook users' page constitute "friends" in any practical sense? "The answer to that is mostly no," answers Ronald Lawrence, executive director of the Community Counseling Center of Southern Nevada. "You may call yourself friends. You may share a lot of things," Lawrence says. But, for Lawrence, friendship is built upon, and is nourished by, multiple levels of interaction beyond just words on a computer screen. "It's social, it's emotional, it's psychological and it's spiritual," Lawrence says, and "it's hard to experience those dimensions on a flat screen." In a friendship, "there is something ... that happens at unconscious levels, and I actually believe that people have to be in contact with each other, in the presence of each other, to experience that friendship," he adds. Lawrence, by the way, is not on Facebook. continued on next slide

"Myself, I won't become a part of it," he explains. "I want my relationships to be in person and deep, and that's just the way it is." Donna Wilburn, a licensed marriage and family therapist, suspects that the meaning a person ascribes to the word "friend" may reveal more about the person using the word than the definition of the word itself. "For instance, somebody who is really in desperate need of friends and who doesn't have any other support system would really hook onto that word, because that's what they need," Wilburn says. In contrast, "someone who has plenty of (real-life) friends and who has no desperate need for friendship would not use the word when talking about Facebook friends. "There's a difference between Facebook friends and friends, but for someone who's really needy and doesn't have a support system, they rely on Facebook friends and bond with them and see them in a different context." Wilburn is on Facebook and says she has Facebook friends "I would not share my personal information with" because "they are not, to me, actual friends unless I actually know them and have bonded with them." Just as they do in real life, Wilburn says, many social media users probably view online "friendship" as a spectrum of relationships ranging from acquaintances to casual friends to, at the other end, best friends. Another change social media bring to friendship is that, for good or bad, it makes it easy to form and maintain friendships. Too busy to send a birthday card? Dash off a quick birthday greeting for her wall. Tired of listening to a friend ramble? Log off. Want to end the friendship completely? Avoid the stress of an in-person breakup by just de-friending him and he'll be none the wiser. Through technology, Wilburn says, "I think we are losing our skill and desire to communicate face to face, and I think that's going to affect us negatively, socially." Online interaction can be less stressful than face-to-face interaction, but it ultimately ends up being isolating, Wilburn says. "I think you need that (real-life) experience, and you need to socialize face to face." "Are we losing or changing our definition of what a 'friend' is based on Facebook friends? Are we now blurring what is a friend? Are we clear what is a friend, or are we just making everybody a friend?" It's a tricky question to answer, and that trickiness may reveal itself when people happen across, in real life, friends they've made on Facebook. Some, Wilburn has noticed, "are, like, 'Yes, we're friends. We connected and we bonded.' " And, she adds, "I've come across people who see their Facebook friends in public and don't acknowledge them as friends."

Answer Questions Complete the 5 text-dependent questions.

Part Two: Additional Sources Directions: Read the essay prompt on the next slide. Then, read and analyze all of the additional texts by taking notes. In addition to the anchor source, you must refer to at least two of the support texts in your essay.

Essay Prompt: Argument Directions: Review information from the anchor source and at least two of the additional sources you have read and incorporate the information into a coherent, well-developed essay that argues a clear position that either supports or rejects one of the following statements about friendship. Make sure your argument is central; use evidence from the sources to support your reasoning. Avoid merely summarizing the sources. Indicate clearly from which sources you are drawing, whether through direct quotation, paraphrase, or summary. The most valuable gift you can receive is an honest friend. Stephen Richards One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood. Lucius Annaeus Seneca There is flattery in friendship. Shakespeare A friend to all is a friend to none. Aristotle He that is thy friend indeed, He will help thee in thy need: If thou sorrow, he will weep; If thou wake, he cannot sleep: Thus of every grief in heart He with thee does bear a part. These are certain signs to know Faithful friend from flattering foe. Shakespeare

Support Source #1: Youtube Friendship in the Age of Facebook: Rory Varrato at TEDxGrandviewAve Published 3/30/13

Support Source #2: Poem Friendship by Henry David Thoreau I think awhile of Love, and while I think, Love is to me a world, Sole meat and sweetest drink, And close connecting link Tween heaven and earth. I only know it is, not how or why, My greatest happiness; However hard I try, Not if I were to die, Can I explain. I fain would ask my friend how it can be, But when the time arrives, Then Love is more lovely Than anything to me, And so I'm dumb. For if the truth were known, Love cannot speak, But only thinks and does; Though surely out 'twill leak Without the help of Greek, Or any tongue. A man may love the truth and practise it, Beauty he may admire, And goodness not omit, As much as may befit To reverence. But only when these three together meet, As they always incline, And make one soul the seat, And favorite retreat, Of loveliness; When under kindred shape, like loves and hates And a kindred nature, Proclaim us to be mates, Exposed to equal fates Eternally; And each may other help, and service do, Drawing Love's bands more tight, Service he ne'er shall rue While one and one make two, And two are one; In such case only doth man fully prove Fully as man can do, What power there is in Love His inmost soul to move Resistlessly. ______ Two sturdy oaks I mean, which side by side, Withstand the winter's storm, And spite of wind and tide, Grow up the meadow's pride, For both are strong Above they barely touch, but undermined Down to their deepest source, Admiring you shall find Their roots are intertwined Insep'rably.

Support Source #3: Article You’ve Got to Have (150) Friends By ROBIN DUNBAR NYTimes.com MORE than anything since the invention of the postal service, Facebook has revolutionized how we relate to one another. But the revolution hasn’t come in quite the way that the people behind it and other social networking sites assume. These sites may have allowed us to amass thousands of “friends,” but they have not yet devised a way to cut through the clunky, old-fashioned nature of relationships themselves. Our circle of actual friends remains stubbornly small, limited not by technology but by human nature. What Facebook has done, though, is provide us a way to maintain those circles in a fractured, dynamic world. Social networking and other digital media have long promised to open up wonderful new vistas, all from the comfort of our own homes. The limitations of face-to-face interaction that have, until now, bound us to our small individual worlds — the handful of people we meet in our everyday lives — would be overcome. The critical component in social networking is the removal of time as a constraint. In the real world, according to research by myself and others, we devote 40 percent of our limited social time each week to the five most important people we know, who represent just 3 percent of our social world and a trivially small proportion of all the people alive today. Since the time invested in a relationship determines its quality, having more than five best friends is impossible when we interact face to face, one person at a time. Instant messaging and social networking claim to solve that problem by allowing us to talk to as many people as we like, all at the same time. Like the proverbial lighthouse blinking on the horizon, our messages fan out into the dark night to every passing ship within reach of an Internet connection. We can broadcast, literally, to the world. I use the word “broadcast” because, despite Facebook’s promise, that is the fundamental flaw in the logic of the social-networking revolution. The developers at Facebook overlooked one of the crucial components in the complicated business of how we create relationships: our minds. continued on next slide

Put simply, our minds are not designed to allow us to have more than a very limited number of people in our social world. The emotional and psychological investments that a close relationship requires are considerable, and the emotional capital we have available is limited. Indeed, no matter what Facebook allows us to do, I have found that most of us can maintain only around 150 meaningful relationships, online and off — what has become known as Dunbar’s number. Yes, you can “friend” 500, 1,000, even 5,000 people with your Facebook page, but all save the core 150 are mere voyeurs looking into your daily life — a fact incorporated into the new social networking site Path, which limits the number of friends you can have to 50. What’s more, contrary to all the hype and hope, the people in our electronic social worlds are, for most of us, the same people in our offline social worlds. In fact, the average number of friends on Facebook is 120 to 130, just short enough of Dunbar’s number to allow room for grandparents and babies, people too old or too young to have acquired the digital habit. This isn’t to say that Facebook and its imitators aren’t performing an important, even revolutionary, task — namely, to keep us in touch with our existing friends. Until relatively recently, almost everyone on earth lived in small, rural, densely interconnected communities, where our 150 friends all knew one another, and everyone’s 150 friends list was everyone else’s. But the social and economic mobility of the past century has worn away at that interconnectedness. As we move around the country and across continents, we collect disparate pockets of friends, so that our list of 150 consists of a half-dozen subsets of people who barely know of one another’s existence, let alone interact. Our ancestors knew the same people their entire lives; as we move around, though, we can lose touch with even our closest friends. Emotional closeness declines by around 15 percent a year in the absence of face-to-face contact, so that in five years someone can go from being an intimate acquaintance to the most distant outer layer of your 150 friends. Facebook and other social networking sites allow us to keep up with friendships that would otherwise rapidly wither away. And they do something else that’s probably more important, if much less obvious: they allow us to reintegrate our networks so that, rather than having several disconnected subsets of friends, we can rebuild, albeit virtually, the kind of old rural communities where everyone knew everyone else. Welcome to the electronic village. Robin Dunbar is a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Oxford and the author of “How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks.”

Support Source #4: Article Is True Friendship Dying Away? by Mark Vernon 7/26/2010 USA Today To anyone paying attention these days, it's clear that social media — whether Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or any of the countless other modern-day water coolers — are changing the way we live. Indeed, we might feel as if we are suddenly awash in friends. Yet right before our eyes, we're also changing the way we conduct relationships. Face-to-face chatting is giving way totexting and messaging; people even prefer these electronic exchanges to, for instance, simply talking on a phone.Smaller circles of friends are being partially eclipsed by Facebook acquaintances routinely numbered in the hundreds. Amid these smaller trends, growing research suggests we could be entering a period of crisis for the entire concept of friendship. Where is all this leading modern-day society? Perhaps to a dark place, one where electronic stimuli slowly replace the joys of human contact. Awareness of a possible problem took off just as the online world was emerging. Sociologist Robert Putnampublished the book Bowling Alone, a survey of the depleting levels of "social capital" in communities, from churches to bowling allies. The pattern has been replicated elsewhere in the Western world. In the United Kingdom, the Mental Health Foundation just published The Lonely Society, which notes that about half of Brits believe they're living in, well, a lonelier society. One in three would like to live closer to their families, though social trends are forcing them to live farther apart. Typically, the pressures of urban life are blamed: In London, another poll had two-fifths of respondents reporting that they face a prevailing drift away from their closest friends. Witness crowded bars and restaurants after work: We have plenty of acquaintances, though perhaps few individuals we can turn to and share deep intimacies. American sociologists have tracked related trends on a broader scale, well beyond the urban jungle. According to work published in the American Sociological Review, the average American has only two close friends, and a quarter don't have any. continued on next slide

Shallow friendships It should be noted that other social scientists contest these conclusions. Hua Wang and Barry Wellman, of the universities of Southern California and Toronto respectively, refer to "some panic in the United States about a possible decline in social connectivity." But notice their language: "social connectivity." That is not the same as intimate friendship. While social networking sites and the like have grown exponentially, the element that is crucial, and harder to investigate, is the quality of the connections they nurture. Yet we know that less is more when it comes to deeper relationships. It is lonely in the crowd. A connection may only be a click away, but cultivating a good friendship takes more. It seems common sense to conclude that "friending" online nurtures shallow relationships — as the neologism "friending" itself implies. It is striking that loneliness should be regarded as a mental health issue, and that seems right. At least since the ancient Greeks, it has been recognized in our political philosophies that we are social animals. Aristotle was just one thinker to remark that an individual could have everything that life can offer — career, family and money — but if a person didn't have a good friend, his or her life would be fundamentally lacking. A society that thwarts opportunities for deeper sociality, therefore, stymies well-being. No single person is at fault, of course. The pressures on friendship today are broad. They arise from the demands of work, say, or a general busyness that means we have less quality time for others. How many individuals would say that friendship is the most important thing in their lives, only to move thousands of miles across the continent to take up a better-paid job? It starts with childhood Of course, we learn how to make friends — or not — in our most formative years, as children. Recent studies on childhood, and how the contemporary life of the child affects friendships, are illuminating. Again, the general mood is one of concern, and a central conclusion often reached relates to a lack of what is called "unstructured time." Structured time results from the way an average day is parceled up for our kids — time for school, time for homework, time for music practice, even time for play. Yet too often today, no period is left unstructured. After all, who these days lets his child just wander off down the street? But that is precisely the kind of fallow time so vital for deeper friendships. It's then that we simply "hang out," with no tasks, no deadlines and no pressures. It is in those moments that children and adults alike can get to know others for who they are in themselves. If there is a secret to close friendship, that's it. Put down the device; engage the person. Aristotle had an attractive expression to capture the thought: close friends, he observed, "share salt together." It's not just that they sit together, passing the salt across the meal table. It's that they sit with one another across the course of their lives, sharing its savor — its moments, bitter and sweet. "The desire for friendship comes quickly; friendship does not," Aristotle also remarked. It's a key insight for an age of instant social connectivity, though one in which we paradoxically have an apparently growing need to be more deeply connected. Mark Vernon is a writer and honorary research fellow at Birkbeck College in London. He is the author of the new book The Meaning of Friendship.

Support Source #5: Article Power packs: Teens today prefer friendship in groups Technology, modern-day parenting techniques and societal norms make such arrangements possible — if not preferable September 26, 2010 By Vikki Ortiz Healy, Chicago Tribune When Brenda Lee was a teen in the 1970s, she had one — and only one — best friend throughout high school. So, Lee worried when her 15-year-old daughter, Robyn, seemed to be cycling through a new best friend every six months at York Community High School in Elmhurst. "It's like a bad thing to have one friend," explained Robyn, who clarified that she actually has four best friends at all times, with 15 to 20 other close friends she considers part of her regular social circle. "If you have one friend, it means only one person likes you," she said. "That's not cool." Technology, modern-day parenting techniques and societal norms have made it possible — if not preferable — for teens to claim hundreds of friends on their Facebook pages, to text weekend plans to dozens at a time from their cell phones, and to spend hours electronically keeping up with people they barely know rather than actually talking to one close friend. For decades, experts studying teen cliques have known that teenagers prefer to travel in packs. In studies conducted in 1963 and in 1995, researchers found teen friendship groups averaged six persons, said Melissa Witkow, an assistant professor of psychology at Willamette University in Oregon. In 2005, when teens were asked to estimate how many friends they kept in touch with regularly, the average answer was 20, according to data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. "When I think of myself growing up, you lived in your neighborhood and you had your best friend that lived down the street from you. You didn't necessarily travel in this powerful pack," said Susan Bartell, a New-York based psychologist who specializes in teens and tweens. "Now the group is where they're getting their strength from." The shift to group-style friendships has notable upsides, such as increasing the likelihood of more diverse connections and boosting teens' self-esteem by giving them a place to belong. A study published last summer in the online edition of Journal of Research on Adolescence showed that teens with more friends in school had higher grade-point averages. But those monitoring the change also are paying attention to potential downsides. "The notion of friendship is still critical, but it's becoming much more complicated," said Bernardo Carducci, a professor of psychology at Indiana University Southeast. continued on next slide

In a sample collected last week from 70,000 Facebook pages, 10- to 20-year-old users had a median number of 440 friends. That's more than double the 197 median for those 40 to 50 years old, said Dan Zarella, who gives marketing lectures about how to understand such trends for HubSpot, his company, based in Cambridge, Mass. MaryRose Moss, a 17-year-old in Chicago, knows firsthand how friendships can accumulate. She created a Facebook page when she was 14 and within months counted, among her group of 500 friends, teens she hadn't seen since kindergarten and others she had met only once. The high school senior eventually got rid of her Facebook page because just reading her friends' news updates could take an hour. Text messaging has opened the door to many new connections, she said. "I'm friends with some people that I wouldn't be as close to if it weren't for technology," said Moss. "It's so easy to send a text to somebody even if you didn't know them very well." Her parents marvel at the ease in which their daughter collects friendships and at the way she and her friends hang out in big numbers, even on first dates or while attending a school dance. "Only after I was a senior in high school was there a group of people that were friends, and in my group, there were more girls than boys," said her mother, Linda Moss. "MaryRose has been doing it since freshman year." Many of today's teens grew up with their parents managing their free time, from arranging play dates to enrolling them in organized sports and other activities. Some psychologists wonder whether, now, social-networking technology is further delaying opportunities to learn negotiation and other socializing skills children once derived from making friends the old-fashioned way. "If somebody disagrees with you, you can 'defriend' them with the click of a keystroke," said Carducci. "You don't get that practice, you don't get that connection, you don't get used to having to do the work." Bartell, a psychologist and author of "The Top 50 Questions Kids Ask," said she has seen some teens identify with a group so closely that they give their groups names or label members of the group siblings on Facebook. But the same group that makes some teens feel part of something can make teens on the outskirts feel even more alienated, Bartell noted. "It sometimes gets very exclusive and does shut other kids out and can perpetuate that 'Mean Girls' stuff," she said. Marianne Boe, a social studies teacher at Resurrection High School on the Northwest Side, sees signs of changing friendship in the hallways. A decade ago, she could easily identify clusters of girls who stayed friends through all four years of high school. Today, it's harder to pinpoint the cliques because they are more fluid, Boe said. "They've got all these friends, but they don't have those intimate ties," said Boe. "It's easy to convince yourself you have a million friends, when really, who are the ones who know dad is out of a job? Or who know that your parents are getting a divorce?" Other research suggests that teens' friendship habits today are different but not detrimental. Studies show that the groups teens associate with most closely online are still friends made at school and through extracurricular activities. The Internet often enhances those relationships, said Vili Lehdonvirta, of the Helsinki Institute of Information Technology. "It's just a continuation of existing friendships," said Lehdonvirta, "a way of overcoming issues of distances." Psychologists suggest the best way for parents to deal with the shift in the way teens treat friendships is to help the adolescents maintain a balance. Allow them to enjoy the group friendships fostered by various forms of technology, but encourage them to participate in other environments, such as after-school jobs or volunteering, that promote one-on-one connections, they say. It's an approach that Lee, Robyn's mom, tries to remember every time she starts feeling sorry for her daughter's last best friend who doesn't appear to be coming around anymore. "You always think something happened, but it doesn't seem to be that way," said Lee. "They're still part of the group."

PBT Checklist: When constructing your argument essay, be sure to • refer to the anchor source in your essay. • use at least two other sources to support your essay. • properly cite each reference used within your essay. • organize your essay in a logical structure that is easy to follow. • Include an introduction and a conclusion. • Include at least two support paragraphs. • Share your document with me when you are finished. By Sam Ward, USA TODAY

Love and Friendship