"This book explores the nature of technology - participatory media in particular - and its effects on our friendships and our fundamental sense of togetherness. Situating the notion of friendship in the modern era, the author examines the possibilities and challenges of technology on our friendships. Taking a media ecology approach to interpersonal communication, she looks at issues around phenomenology, recognition of friends as unique, hermeneutics in a digital world and mediated communication, social dimensions of time and space, hypertextuality, and communication ethics. Examining friendship as a communicative phenomenon and exploring the ways in which it is created, sustained, managed, produced, and reproduced, this book will be relevant to scholars and students of interpersonal communication, mediated communication, communication theory and philosophy, and media ecology"-- Provided by publisher.

Introduction: Friendship as a Communicative Phenomenon 1. The Phenomenology of Encounter and its Relationship to Friendship2. Particularity and Voice: Recognizing our Friends as Unique3. Hermeneutic Presence: Dialogue and Digitization and the Implications for Friendship4. Time and Space: Altered Dimensions of Friendship 5. Sunaisthesis: The Synecdochal Activity of Friendship Ethics 6. Better People, Better World: Friendship as a Communicative Good

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.