Why Podcasts Are Like Friends

And why the Facebook Newsfeed isn't

Our world is lonely.

We feel more alone and we are more alone. Loneliness was on the rise even before we covered our faces with fabric and distanced ourselves from each other as cats do from dogs. And things keep getting worse. The stats are undeniable. We’re increasingly lonely.

But… why?

A decade ago, people were already questioning whether technology was making us more lonely:

We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.

The point is well-made. If the life mission of Facebook’s Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg was to connect the world and create things — and by the way, it still is — then he certainly has failed the first part. In response to a question about the meaning of life, Zuckerberg reflected on how skipping school to play with friends is likely a lot of the point of life. That’s how he described connection - as a form of friendship. He’s right. Friendship is central to life.

But has Facebook really connected us? I don’t believe Facebook has connected us in a way that resembles friendship, at least not through Facebook’s staple product, the Newsfeed. That’s where the world is watching (no intimacy), where self-expression comes with evil eye (no self-sacrifice), and importantly for my argument, it’s where there is increasingly little self-selection due to the ever-increasing dominance of Meta’s AI algorithm (no choice).

Friendship is About Choice

The good people at Comment asked men and women around the world what friendship meant to them. There are some good answers. Like many (most?) of my undergraduate papers, I’d like to submit a late entry:

Friendship consists of an ongoing choice between two parties to befriend the other. Friendship is about choice.

It is about more than that but self-selection is unique to friendships in a way that is not true of other relationships. If you’re an employee, you don’t get to choose your boss. If you’re the CEO, you still have obligations to your employees. If you’re married, well, you’ve entered a covenant that shouldn’t be broken. As the vow goes, “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part.”

This is not true about friendship. C.S. Lewis calls this the kingliness of friendship. We are not tied down with our individual roles and responsibilities in friendship but rather “we meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts.” Lewis continues:

At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague, or subordinate. Not among our Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

Hence (if you will not misunderstand me) the exquisite arbitrariness and irresponsibility of this love. I have no duty to be anyone’s Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine.

Friendship consists of an ongoing choice between two parties to befriend the other.

Tech Mediates Friendship For Good and Bad

I was pretty hard on Facebook earlier but I should clarify — some aspects of Facebook help friendships grow. Consider Facebook Groups, which, by their nature, you choose to enter into, choose to leave at any point, and choose the degree of notifications you will receive to engage. Some good choice here. Though, as I have realized, the more groups that you join and the more people in those groups, the more Facebook’s algorithm will exert its dominance and remove my independent choice and my sense of befriending others. Perhaps this is why so many people are moving to group messaging platforms and Discord servers.

Technology mediates our relationships with one another to either be more or less like the character of true friendships. When everything is fed to you through an algorithm you are no longer a sovereign prince on neutral ground but rather a peasant on a busy countryside road hearing the news only as it passes by.

This is why I think podcasts uniquely resemble friendships. As Tony Reinke, co-host of the Ask Pastor John podcast says, there was a lot of intimacy that came when the radio was in beta. Imagine the sound of Winston Churchill in your own living room! Politicians especially took advantage of this new medium to distribute not only content but their very voice. More of their person was being communicated in comparison to the newspapers. Intimacy was increased as people listened on their leather-backed armchairs.

Podcasts took the intimacy of radio and increased it because, as Reinke says;

The passive listening of radio broadcasts was replaced by choice. Radio was broad-casted; podcasts were narrow-casted — niche, on-demand, self-chosen by listeners. The listener was expected to buy-in to the product and keep returning to voices they came to trust. Podcast listeners were more active in the process, now choosing who to listen to, what episodes to place, when to listen, and at what speed, factors that transformed the experience “from passive and idle to active and engaged.”

And not only do podcasts increase the number of choices we make in the content we consume but podcasts also increase the level of intimacy. Podcasts are like friendships.

Podcasts are neither good nor bad; nor are they neutral

Let’s return to the question of why our society is so lonely. Is one of the reasons due to the increasing sense of friendship that we get from technology? A few weeks ago an individual wrote a post on a public forum in my city:

“Anyone else in their 30s and suddenly have no friends?”

The post now has 176 comments and 294 upvotes; it’s now one of the most popular ever posted to the forum. The potential reasons for the lack of friends included gas prices, a lack of disposable income, Covid hangover, old age, kids, exhaustion, mental illness, demanding jobs, and more. I’m sure even more factors are at play.

Podcasts, like any technology, form us through our use of them. When I regularly listen to the sports pods of Bill Simmons, Zach Lowe, & Kevin O’Conner I get the vague sense of hanging out with them, talking about a shared interest. But when I go back to my real friends I find their NBA opinions to be far less researched, thoughtful, and entertaining.

Since podcasts can satiate our yearning for friendship, they can, in turn, create unrealistic expectations about what experiencing friendship is actually like.

And yet, if we take C.S. Lewis’ description of friendship-love seriously, are we not to conclude that the disembodied, arbitrariness, and irresponsibility of podcasts is a good thing?

In 1986, Melvin Kranzberg produced a set of Kranzberg’s Laws of Technology which have been studied for decades since. The First Law is this:

Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.

This means that:

… technical developments frequently have environmental, social, and human consequences that go far beyond the immediate purposes of the technical devices and practices themselves, and the same technology can have quite different results when introduced into different contexts or under different circumstances.

So podcasts can be used positively and negatively, they can form us in all sorts of directions, and they can be used for redemptive purposes because podcasts actually provide some of the goods of friendship-love that can be experienced by even those who have no “real-life” friends.

Discipleship is About Spiritual Friendship

I believe that good friendships are experienced not through passive consumption but through active creation. Romantic love looks to the other to find fulfillment. Friendship-love, however, looks to some external thing and says to the other, “isn’t that cool?” or, “let’s do that together!”

All the loves are important. But we must cultivate friendship-love, even in our marriages or extended family.

Jonathan Dobson says we ought to think of “making disciples” as primarily relationship-based, relying on trust rather than some sort of top-down disciple program. He even goes so far as to say we should try to use the term “disciple-making” less because of its negative connection and we should instead encourage the use of “spiritual friendship” to describe the relational life of disciple-making.

I’m not fully convinced by Dobson here, since I want to redeem Biblical language and since there are more loves than just friendship-love. For example, we need the pastoral love that comes in sermons and the obligatory love that is to be shared within our families. But he’s still got a point.

Jesus said,

I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you…

Jesus describes us Christians as his friends. Why? Because of the intimacy, the shared knowledge, and importantly, the very fact of Jesus’ choosing of us. He is a good friend to us. He says we do not naturally choose him. But he chooses us.

Why are we lonely? Why don’t we have good friends?

As Tim Keller says,

“Let us admit that one of the reasons we do not have the friends that are hearts need is not because of our terrible mobile society but because we aren’t the friends we should be. The reason why we don’t have enough great friends is that we are not great friends!”

Our model & motivation for friendship should be Jesus’ friendship with us. Just as he choose us, we then choose others. We befriend them. And we love them and sacrifice for them. Jesus said there is no greater love than to lay down your life for your friends.

We know we aren’t good friends. We know of people in our lives who we should have reached out to more, made a meal for, or been more present with. Never forget, though, that the Christian is not guilt-motivated but gospel-motivated. The gospel is that Jesus chooses us and forgives us of our friendlessness so that we might be friends of God and friends to those in the world. So maybe Dobson is right. Maybe Christianity really is about friendship.

As far as podcasts go, they exist like a candle in the night, giving off flame and warmth and tangible good. But one day the wick will grow small and the light will be no more.

I am thankful for my disembodied & unidirectional friendship with podcasters Kevin O’Conner, Alastair Roberts, and Matthew Lee Anderson. I have intimidate knowledge of them and their views, and we share many of the same interests. Thanks to earbuds, their voices have been placed inside my head.

But I am more thankful for the spiritual & mutual friendship I have with Jesus Christ, who lives inside my heart. One day I will visit him, like an old friend, in an embodied new heavens and new earth. I think I’ll give him a hug. And then I think I’ll ask him if he wants to do record a podcast with me. He is, after all, my friend.