ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with practices and understandings of friendship in social and digital media, with a particular focus on young people. Friendship remains difficult to study and this relates to its ubiquity, its variety, and its lack of recognised social norms. Sociologists who are less oriented to feminist and queer theory tend to discuss the growing significance of friendship as a symptom of late modernity, citing theorists such as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens. Discussions of friendship as voluntary, reciprocal, and without rules or structure, suggest that friendship is malleable, open, and easy. C. S. Lewis states that friendship is unnecessary but adds value to life. Despite frequent emphasis that friendship is freely chosen and practised, as discussed, there are some obvious limitations to this claim. Social media use among young people is centrally oriented to friendship, as many researchers have demonstrated.
