Love and Friendship
Performance-Based Task
Part One: Anchor Source
Directions: Analyze the article on the 4th and 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 cyberearshot -- 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 defriending 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 (reallife) 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
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.
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.
These sites may have allowed us to amass thousands of “friends,”
but they have not yet devised a way to cut through the clunky, oldfashioned 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.
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.
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.
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.
By
ROBIN DUNBAR NYTimes.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 to
texting 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 Putnam published
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 20year-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 oldfashioned 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
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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.
o Include an introduction and a conclusion.
o Include at least two support paragraphs.
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Share your document with me when you are finished.
By Sam Ward, USA TODAY