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HOST) According to Facebook, 500 million people, or one-twelfth of the world’s population, are "friends." Commentator Bill Mares reflects on the meaning of friendship in the digital age.
(MARES) After I saw the film The Social Network and read that Facebook, the subject of the film, has more than 500 million "friends," I began to muse about the nature of friendship. Just what is a "friend"? I wondered.
Settling on a definition turned out to be harder than I thought. There’s an wide spectrum of "friends" – based upon shared activities, agreeable temperaments, and pure happenstance. From drinking buddies to foxhole buddies. From teammates to seat-mates. From a TV sit-com to a pacifist sect. There are political Friends of Bill Clinton and Friends of George Bush who just raise money.
Someone, maybe Groucho Marx, joked that the difference between a friend and an old friend is five minutes. Facebook has shortened that to a few key-strokes, while at the same time turning the noun "friend" into a verb!
Early last month, Mark Zukerberg, the founder of Facebook, announced a completely overhauled, brand new version of Groups. He said, "It’s a simple way to stay up to date with small groups of your friends and to share things with only them…The default setting is Closed, which means only members see what’s going on in a group… The net effect is your whole experience is organized around spaces of the people you care most about."
Well, gosh, I say, that sounds like the privacy and control we had before Facebook came on the scene.
Even Facebook recognizes that one "friend" does not fit all.
Personally, I would define good friends as people who inspire me, stimulate me, get me out of myself, and accept my weaknesses – like my good friend, the late Bill Gray, who once said that "…a true friend would drop everything to answer your call for help. No questions asked."
Another friend, who has lived in both rural Vermont and bustling Burlington, observed that small town friendships were fewer but more broad-ranging, while those in Burlington were more numerous but shallower.
Indeed, as Cicero said, "A friend is, as it were, a second self."
Friendship is a complex relationship – not just a touch-and-go landing.
When it comes to having many friends, I like to think of the Olympic symbol of overlapping intertwined rings – circles of neighbors, college chums, family, other volunteer workers, book club members, fellow teachers, legislators, running buddies, on and on. The more they overlap, the closer the friendship.
Henry Adams, the descendant of two Presidents – John and John Quincy – wrote, "One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, and a rivalry of aim."
Come to think of it, he could have been writing about the person who’s been my best friend – without the assistance of Facebook – for more than forty years. And that person is my wife.