David Weinberger’s post explores the notion of friendship, a concept I’ve taken particular interest in lately, especially since I’m teaching a rhetoric course on this theme in the fall.

But here is my motivated definition of friendship: a friend is someone in whom you confide. Now there are levels to this confiding. For example, you might have a colleage in whom you would confide your critical opinion of your boss, but you wouldn’t tell that same person you were cheating on your spouse. Similarly, you might have a good friend with whom you would share your infidelity, but you might not tell that person your opinion of some professional issue, simply b/c s/he wouldn’t be interested.

I think this goes along with David’s notion that friends relax rules of behavior: judgment is suspended. However, we also expect confidentiality. That is, to continue David’s example, we generally expect that our friends will not go around telling others how badly our feet smell (good-natured making fun aside).

As I said, this is a motivated definition. So what’s my motivation?

Well I continue to mull the relationship between friendship and cryptography. This is a rather facile connection, at least to start: both friends and codes keep secrets, though both are also means for sharing secrets. I am also curious about the notion of a blogging “community” and what these means about how we conceive friendship (which is why David’s post is so appropriate on the Many-to-Many site).

If, as I think is clear, the cultural valence of the blog (if not its technological structure) is to bridge conventional notions of public and private, then the blog offers a certain rhetoric of confidentiality or friendship. Given the ubiquity of blogs, who would read this far unless they were in some way “friendly” to what I am writing? I suppose you could argue this might be the case with any website. Perhaps, but I think that the way in which the weblog remediates the journal gives it a special rhetorical quality in this regard.

Now at this point, you might be wondering how this can relate to cryptography. You might think that posting something to a blog is not a particularly good way of keeping it secret (to which I might reply that obviously you haven’t seen the statistics for website traffic for this site). But self-deprecating statements aside, it is, in fact, the ostensibly public nature of the Web, blogs, and the friendships they establish, at least rhetorically speaking, that produce iterations of cryptograhy from the firewall behind which I am writing this message and the files encrypted on my hard drive to the various protections that prevent my site and e-mail from getting spammed (with varying degrees of success).

Just as, on one level, the Web creates connections across borders, on another level, it establishes borders. Offshore data havens, anonymous peer-to-peer networks, encryption protocols, VPN tunnels, etc: obviously not everyone is friendly out there.

So, remember when you were a kid and you and your best friend made up some secret code? Or you had a secret handshake for your clubhouse? Or something like that?

Friendship is cryptography: the confidential transmission of information in a code. Like this message: who but my friends will read it and understand it? Those who are not friends may find it and view it, but will their reading of the message allow them to break the code? Or will they simply move on?