Friending in New Territores, New Times and the Finicky Future

While facebook has redefined the concept of friendship and how and to what degree you both contact and stay in touch with new and old friends alike, I still enjoy the old fashioned friend. In various dictionaries, a friend is usually defined as everything between "a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard" and "a person who is not hostile". That last one sounds like a horrible definition of a friend in my ears. Of course, it is context-dependent, but saying you have a lot of people who are not hostile towards you doesn't really say much about how many people you know or care about.. But I'm thoroughly derailing. My point here is that while ten years ago, the former definition of a friend was more the more prevalent, while as the userbase of facebook has expanded to include a whooping six percent of the World's population since its inception in 2004 (and keep in mind, that's every fourth person on the internet).

When it comes to friends, I'm an old fashioned kind of guy. Where I still define most of the people around me as acquaintances and friends, with a few close friends as well, most others seem to now have only friends and close friends. It is as if the boundary that previously defined you and your closer acquaintances as a separate entity from the rest of the world is dissipating.

No doubt, this is because of the push of some of the larger players on the web (read: facebook, twitter, other social networking sites) towards the so-called "open web," where everyone is everyone else's friend, but this creates a problem for some. I have upon several occasions seen people struggle to define their relationship with someone with which they are on the saying-hello-in-the-hallways level. They can't really call them friends, but it's as if the entire concept of acquantances – even the word itself – is no longer a part of our social paradigm.

This has both positive and negative implications. Whether we like it or not, how we label and describe the world around us strongly affects how we perceive it. With the merging of acquaintances and friends into one huge category, it is easier to make friends as you only have to talk to someone once to consider them your friend. This makes it easier to meet new people and to open up to them initially. Suddenly, you are friends with the guy who works at the grocery store who you talked about the weather with that one time and now say hello to whenever the two of you see each other, you are friends with the guy from that other department who you worked with once, and you are friends with your friend's girlfriend's half brother because you met him at that party that one time when you were visiting the capital.

That is all nice, but what about the trade-off and implications? Is the concept of friends watered down into something worthless because it is a title most anyone can obtain? Is a friend actually the same today as it was ten years ago? Am I overreacting?

We are, however, saved a bit by the closeness and intimacy of family ties, and the slightly childish, but necessary and understandable concept of having best friends. Whatever the case, I will continue to subscribe to my old-fashioned model of acquaintances. I want to keep my friendships as important as I can. It's not that I'm cheap or isolated, but I want to be a bit frugal with how I hand out my friendship-status. I still want a lot of friends, but I want them all to be people that matter to me, and I want to be someone who matters to them, not just one of a horde of faces with a title on top.

This wasn't where I figured I'd be going when I started this, but I suppose this is important to me as well. What I'm saying is: Place value in your relationships, care about the people close to you, and make sure to get fewer friends.

(A while back, I read an article about how most people can actually only maintain a network of up to 150 friends without going over your capacity so to speak. I'd link, but I don't remember where I read it. I'm just saying...)