Friendship, in my definition, is a form of relationship when you have a trade with someone in a social content. Each one of us is a form of supply and demand. We require attention, however we couldn't really be self-sufficient. Therefore we have to socialize in order to meet the demand within ourselves. For instance, when someone who I have never met before introduces him and begin a conversation with me, he might be lonely or he just wants to talk to somebody to fulfill his social needs. Coincidentally I am also a supplier and I can supply what he needs. I talk to him. In exchange, he talks back to me and fulfills my social needs as well. By looking at this we can say that we just have a mutual beneficial relationship.
Taking this logic a bit further down, how friendship bonds become even stronger. People act purposefully and responses to incentives. We can say that in the form of friendship an incentive can be a compliment, an encouragement, a secret shared, and many more. When I receive a compliment from a girl who I just met I become very happy and I response to it even happier, subsequently fulfill her social need or the attention that she wants from me. Moving on, we might ask each other out to have dinner together. I might ask her out because her presence or her speech makes me feel good. It's a form of incentives. In return she might be lonely and just want to have someone to accompany her as well. It's another trade in between a friendship.
Of course different people reacts to incentives differently, some might point out that it takes more effort to win a girl's heart to be her best friend forever. Other might not require any big physical forms of incentives because he truly wants to be your friend. Because all these forms of social "goods" (like chatting, hanging out, playing together, so on) definitely have no forms of intrinsic value, it is up to the supplier and consumer to determine their own reasonable price over these "goods".
Has friendship becomes cheaper in today's society, given that we currently have so many social network like Facebook, Twitter and Myspace? In my opinion it is kinda true, though you don't really have any statistical support to proof this. Because of the existence of new social network, our social needs can be fulfilled even more easily than before. Just by receiving a few click of like on my Facebook post and we are pretty much satisfied. Our friendship becomes more casual and simplistic.
Maybe by understanding friendship in an economist perspective can't really teach you how to make new friends to meet your social needs but it can surely explain to you why you end up having thousands of Facebook friends without anyone whom you can share your deepest secret with.
*Just some rambling thoughts that pops into my mind.*
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