Real-life Friends

Most of us have a lot of friends. We know a lot of people by their first names, we know a lot about what is happening in a lot of others' lives. Most of those people, though, we rarely see face-to-face. Kind of ironic that they call the thing "Face"book, huh?

Following up on yesterday's post, I am thinking about the relationships behind the news. The prevalence of news relies on rapid dissemination, which means the written word broadcast over the internet. Nothing else packs as much factual information into the short time we have to consume it. So as we are innundated with news, it becomes a requirement that we spend more time on reading written stuff (with occasional pictures) than on talking and listening.

Scott (see, I know him by his first name!) posted recently about how friendships are formed. He argues that shared experiences trump shared values every time. Most college roommates and comrades-in-arms would agree. While he uses an online example to show this, I think it is a rare thing for an experience to be shared with someone in another room or country, even in today's connected world.

So in this new Web 2.0 world of social media, who are your real friends? Who have you had dinner with lately, or trusted to watch your kids? Who sees your tears and hears your laughter? Who shares your life beyond consuming your broadcasts?

Our real friends are not our Twitter followers and Facebook friends (though overlap is certainly possible). We all acknowledge this intellectually, but do we embrace it really? Do we spend as much time cultivating even just one real friendship as we do a hundred or a thousand virtual ones? To put a blunt point on it, when it hits the fan, who will visit the hospital, look after your kids, bring you a meal, or just tell you the truth you don't want to hear?

As we enjoy the amazing awesomeness that is the Internet, let us not lose sight of real life. For what good is it for a man to gain the whole world wide web, yet forfeit his real soul?