I giggled through most of the article right up until I got to this quote, "I vaguely remember trying to make friends pre-MySpace, but in 16 years, I only made three real friends."
"Friends"
"Friendship"
"Real Friends"
What do we mean by those terms?
When in Ireland, Mark and I spoke with a group of 5 who had met each other over MySpace. One Irish, one Northern Irish, one Welsh with vampire teeth implants, now engaged to one of two English. This Internet thing does get people together in droves at DSL speeds.You can technically "shop" for friends. The article went on to say, "members cannot list hobbies and interests... making friendship compatibility and popularity nearly impossible to predetermine." A sort of ironic statement here, but you get the point.
1 comment:
This is one of my favorite topics, that I like to ponder from time to time, gradually working toward The Answer that I trust will hit me eventually....
...The Internet is really a two-edged sword. On the one hand, there are so many delightful examples of people meeting friends, spouses, soulmates online that it is easy to think that its all on the plus side. Of course, the flip side is that I think in a weird way social networking sites can be very atomizing - so we know all our fellow Risk-playing Trekkies in Cherrydale Arlington, but not the people in the apartment accross the hall. I feel like there must be a lot of implications that go along with that - any technology that changes the dynamics of human social interaction is going to have a lot of implications - but I haven't figured what its going to mean a generation or two from now....
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