The Windkey and the Lamplighter

The was a [story on All Things Considered][] as I was driving home
last night about Facebook, from the host of "Wait, Wait, Don’t
Tell Me".
He started out by playing up his self-imposed lonership, so maybe I
shouldn’t be surprised that he "doesn’t get" social networking,
but I am anyway. He just joined Facebook, found and "friended"
some people he knew who were already there. He sort of glossed over
the step where a friending miracle occurred, but claims to now have
900 "virtual friends"—which is the crux of my objection to his
piece.

He was very careful to dismiss them as virtual, not actual friends and
to explain that, even though they "aren’t really there", he’s glad
that they "won’t really be there tomorrow, either". Unfortunately,
he’s wrong about that. A huge proportion of my friends on Facebook
(and Livejournal, and Orkut, and MySpace, and
insert-other-social-networking-site-here) are real friends, whom I see
in person frequently. A much larger proportion are old friends, whom
I would otherwise not keep in touch with—high school friends,
college friends, former coworkers and the like. The third
group—whom I assume were most of this guy’s virtual friends, since
he appeared to acquire a lot of friends very fast—are those people
whom I’ve never met in person. Many of these, however, are just as
close as many of the people I have met. There’s no magic friendship
virus transmitted by an in-person meeting that makes someone suddenly
more compatible, better to play Scrabble or trivia games with, or that
makes their life more interesting for me to voyeuristically follow
along with.
They’re just as real as my "real" friends, and I don’t really
understand why they wouldn’t be for this guy, unless he keeps them
distant.
Maybe that’s part of the generation gap that I can’t really see—my
friends, regardless of whether I’ve met them in the flesh, do much of
their correspondence online. I probably talk to my close friends
more over email and instant messaging programs than I do in person,
simply because there’s so much more time to talk. (I’d feel
unprofessional taking a personal call at work, and I’d feel rude being
on my cell phone while waiting in line at the supermarket, but I could
IM that friend while waiting for a model to open, or text-message them
while in line.)

This leads me to wonder how my generation will feel about truly
virtual friends—bots, AIs, and the like. I’ve already seen one
online community raise their own pet ‘bot, who can now participate in
conversations just as well as any troll. Will we draw a line between
friendly AIs and the fleshy friends we’ve never met? If the AIs can
play Scrabble and talk about each other, I suspect the line will be
thin.

(1) I can’t argue with him that "friended" is an annoying new word. I
don’t see what was wrong with "befriended", but I know my
predeliction for archaic words isn’t shared by most Facebook users or
even most English speakers. I’m kind of surprised that he didn’t seem
to realize that "friend"(2) had a verb form before social networking
websites re-verbed it in a new, short, hipper(3) form.

(2) Also, "friend" is a really weird looking word. That ie does not
belong, and is part of why friended looks weird. Weird is a weird
word, too, for exactly the opposite reason.

(3) I bet the kids don’t say "hip" anymore. See note (1) above on my
love for archaic words.

[story on All Things
Considered]:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16703138