The online world increasingly provides the setting within which many of us
pursue our work lives, our hobbies and interests, and even our more intimate
lives, such as our friendships and loves. Opportunities to express oneself
and form relationships with others have been enormously increased by the
online world. But what sorts of identities and relationships are really
possible? And as we live more online how might this come to affect how we
understand ourselves and our relations with others?

Communication online has provided worlds of self-expression and interaction
that seem distinctive in a number of ways. We are, for example, often
anonymous online. But even if not anonymous we nevertheless can typically
express ourselves and relate to others with little or nil social transaction
costs. We can enter and exit communities or relationships without much of
the effort or costs usually attached in our traditional worlds and we have
unprecedented global opportunities to do so. We are also able to present
ourselves and interact with others with unusually high levels of choice and
control compared to our self-presentations and interactions in non-virtual
worlds. Moreover, focusing on how we can present ourselves to others has
itself been taken to new levels online - many, for example, labour over how
they present themselves on their personal websites and some of these
approximate works of art.

In this special edition we focus on the case of friendship and its apparent
flourishing online. People are forming friendships solely online, many claim
to have several hundred friends online and increasingly existing friendships
are being sustained online. How, if at all, might some features of online
communication and its use affect the sort of friendships we can form and
maintain? What, if anything, might we learn about the nature and value of
close friendship by analysing how they are currently enabled online?

We are interested in papers on the general topic area of friendship in an
increasingly online world. The scope of the topic is quite broad,
implicating fundamental questions about identity and how we may come to
understand ourselves in relation to others online, and about the nature and
value of friendship and communication online. Accordingly, our call for
papers is quite open within these areas.

Submissions will be double-blind refereed for relevance to the theme as well
as academic rigor and originality. High quality articles not deemed to be
sufficiently relevant to the special issue may be considered for publication
in a subsequent non-themed issue of Ethics and Information Technology.

Closing date for submissions: January 7, 2011

To submit your paper, please use the online submission system, to be found at www.editorialmanager.com/etin