Navigating Friendship Among the Consciously Self-aware Generation

This study is an exploration of friendship navigation in-between and through overlapping worlds—online and offline—that have transformed from the pre-social-media boom and the pre-COVID19 pandemic. It focuses on friendship navigations of those born after the year 2000 (i.e., Gen Z and Alpha Gen). Using an exploratory interpretivist approach to communication research and using focus interviews and focus group discussions, this paper examines the adolescents’ accounts of and reflections on the changes and adjustments in their connections with their peers and friends prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, during the period of COVID-19 lockdowns and quarantine protocols, and after the protocols have been relaxed. Using typical case sampling, 19 Filipino adolescents, 11–19 years old, from Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao, the three main regions of the Philippines, were tapped as informants. Although the primary concepts that this research explored were mediated and non-mediated navigations of friendships, data surfaced the informants’ grasp of self-as-third-person or a conscious awareness of being young in today’s world. This complexity in self-awareness is further demonstrated by the findings on the distinct boundary-setting among adolescents. The adolescents’ conscious awareness is not just about navigating friendships per se, but of navigating friendships through mediated communication and the dynamic bridge between offline and online encounters. There is a pronounced ability among the informants not just to adjust and compromise, but also the aptitude to take in different perspectives, the cultivation of provisional explanations to communication gaps, and the proactive creation of contingencies. The paper argues that this consciousness merits further study, and that the circumstances surrounding the pandemic lockdowns and thereafter are fundamental to this expansion of inquiry.