Web of friendships

What does the concept of friendship in the Facebook age have to do with Christian Easter themes of life, death and resurrection? It's all about love, discovers Shane Gilchrist.

Lynne Baab has been engaged in conversations about friendship since she was a child.

By the time she was 15, she had moved house 12 times. As the furniture was rearranged so, too, were relationships. When it comes to fresh starts, Dr Baab is an expert.

She also knows a little something about Christianity (she is the Jack Somerville Lecturer in Pastoral Theology in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Otago) and electronic media (in 2007 she completed a PhD in communication at the University of Washington).

Dr Baab has been particularly busy recently, writing Friending: Real Relationships in a Virtual World, a book for which she interviewed dozens of people between the ages of 12 and 85, specifically looking at the influence of new communication technologies on friendship.

Thus qualified to join a few dots, Dr Baab sees "some very interesting" connections between Easter and friendship.

• Online Easter offerings

"Look at Jesus and the Easter story; it is about betrayal, death and resurrection. That is what happens in friendships. You have conflicts and misunderstandings and a constant process of overcoming a sense of betrayal - big or small - and allowing yourself to have a fresh start within a friendship."

Besides the role of forgiveness in a relationship, equally important is a willingness to take the initiative, as is the ability to alter ingrained friendship patterns, Dr Baab says.

"The idea of a fresh start really runs through the whole of the Bible. Even in the Old Testament there is that word 'repentance', which means 'turn', or to turn away. Are we open to those turns in our friendships?

"Part of the challenge in friendship is always being willing to allow something new to happen, the affirmation of new things. I heard story after story of friendships that morphed well into the relationship.

"One really interesting connection between Easter and friendship via Facebook and other new communication technologies is that Easter is, in part, about new things. Yet many people resist new communication technologies. We can't say that everything new is good, but something about Easter encourages us to be open to new things."

Although the genesis of Dr Baab's book is firmly rooted in the uprooting she experienced as a child ("I've been talking about friendship with my mum and brother since I was 6 or 7 years old ..."), her PhD studies into new media and recent debate about the role of friendship in an online context added to her motivation.

"The overlap with my childhood issues of engagement and the challenges of new media meant I just had to write about it."

Dr Baab says many of those to whom she spoke regard social networking sites as just one means of communication. Though some talked about friendships with people they hadn't actually met, "everybody" said face-to-face interaction was best.