Paul Sassone

Computers do a lot for us — some good, some bad.

One of the unpleasant results of the omnipresence of computers in our lives is the debasement of some basic human values.

Friendship, for example.

Every boob with a computer has hundreds, even thousands of friends.

Bur are those multitudes who glance at your Facebook postings really friends?

Just what does the word, the concept of “friend” mean? And who truly is a friend?

The news on that question is not encouraging.
Scientists actually study friendship. I read of a study conducted by social scientist Alex Pentland, entitled “Are You Your Friends’ Friend?”
Probably not, is the answer.

He asked 84 subjects in a business management class to rate classmates on closeness on a scale of 1 to 5. Feelings of friendship were mutual only 53 percent of the time, though expectations of reciprocity of friendship were at 94 percent.

Other studies of thousands of people also put the reciprocity rate at between 34 and 53 percent.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. We all have felt the sting of finding out that someone we believed was a friend was not. That sting is particularly strong when we discover that someone faked friendship for some kind of gain or advantage.

False friendship, or lack of friendships, can wreak havoc on our physical and mental health.
So, it is important to realize that friendship is a qualitative not a quantitative matter.
There are layers of friendship, according to psychologist I.M. Dunbar.

The top layer consists of only one or two people, a spouse, perhaps, or a best friend. After that, we have room for only four more truly intimate friendships.

People with whom we are not in constant contact — at least weekly — are acquaintances, not friends.

But, that still doesn’t really define what a friend is.

Smart people have been trying to figure that out for thousands of years. A definition I like is: A friend is someone who makes time for you and whose company enlivens and enriches you.

I am fortunate to know a couple of people like that.

And computers have nothing to do with those friendships.

–Computers have nothing  to do with friendships–