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On social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook, there is usually a declaration of how many friends the user has, as well as displays of often rather intimate e-mail messages from those friends.¹ When it first started, one of the people identified as a founder of MySpace, Tom Anderson, would be the first "friend" each subscriber had on-line. By clicking on a link on each page it is possible to see pictures of and links to all of a user's friends, with Tom always among them. Thus, the satirical/self-pitying t-shirt slogan "Tom is my only friend". At one point, Tom had 221,036,100 friends. In fact, since the purchase of MySpace by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, "Tom" is now a corporate identity rather than a reference to a specific individual. We live in a world in which we are increasingly both bound together and separated by the globalized networks of information communications technologies. It is perhaps unsurprising that the concept of "friendship" has become more visible and important as traditional forms of community are eroded and new forms of subjectivity and connection are being developed. Yet, in a situation where "Tom" can claim to have over 220 million "friends", the very term "friendship" needs rethinking. Thus, what our increasingly networked digital culture may need are new conceptions of the relation between self and other and new understandings of community, which in turn may necessitate new ways of thinking about the relation between life and death and between the human and the non-human, and even between the organic and the inorganic.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137026675_9

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