ABSTRACT
This chapter defends the potential for excellent friendship via technological mediation against a number of common objections by appealing to an Aristotelian theory of friendship. It reviews Aristotle's discussion of the nature of excellent friendship, and applying his conception of the shared life to the activities possible through technology. The chapter responds to six objections: the privacy objection, the superficiality objection, the commercialism objection, the deceptiveness objection, the physicality objection, and the poverty of communication objection. Having addressed these concerns, it then explores some ethical issues for technologically mediated friendship, and suggests several ways to use the conception of the shared life to evaluate, design, and use social communication technologies so as to facilitate sharing of flourishing lives. The chapter also explores some ways that friends' actions can badly impact friendships with a digital component. Some relationships on social media become strained when people confuse standards for legal regulation of communication with issues of personal communication in friendship.
