My niece was bragging the other day.
“I have hundreds of friends!” she claimed.
Now my niece is a lovely girl, but hundreds of friends? “Do these people ever call you? Come visit? Go out to lunch?”
Turns out, she meant she has lots of friends on Facebook.
Aaaah, welcome to the wonderful world of the Internet, where a simple click of the button means someone is “your friend.”
Too often, for the lonely women out there, that simple click of a button means “soul mate.”
Don’t get me wrong. Facebook is a lot of fun. I’ve gotten into contact with people I’d forgotten all about. I get to see their families, their hobbies, their lives.
Great fun!
And Twitter? I follow every news agency I can think of, including BBC, Reuters, CNN, Fox and even Al Jazeera. I follow three different local newspapers and I just give a courtesy follow to whatever poor soul wanders in and thinks they should be following me.
How many of the hundred entities I follow do I actually know personally? I’d say about five or six.
But really, are they my friends? Do they come visit me? Do we go to the movies, out to dinner? Can I call them for a sympathetic shoulder to cry on? Will they come over to feed my dogs and cats when I have to be away?
They really should call them something else besides friends. But I guess “acquaintances with whom I have a very slender thread of recognition” is a little too long to fit in a website box.
