Keep your friends close, but your collaborators closer.

In the age of Facebook and social media the method of friendship has been digitized. Gone are the days of stumbling through cities looking for new friends, and the so called, "three hour conversation" as Deresiewicz puts it. We live in an age where friends, partners and even love interests can all be reached from the comfort of your computer. Deresiewicz sees this as the end of the classical ideal of friendship, however Rheingold and Shirky see this technological advance as the harbinger of  a new economic and social wave of collaboration and communication. Are we paying too dear a price for the wonders brought by social media? Or have we evolved to the point that "IRL" friendships and collaborations play a close second to our digital boardrooms and play grounds?


Like so many opponents of the digital age, Deresiewicz sees the detachment of the computer screen as a detriment, asking the question, "are our friendships now anything more than a form of distraction?". Perhaps they are. I for one agree that the internet has changed the way we view other people, but like any change, we give and we take. What we may have lost in lasting, meaningful bonds between other human beings, we have gained in our ability to collaborate and communicate with the world around us. Shirky and Rheingold both make strong arguments, giving us examples of how the internet and social media are helping us solve problems, make money, and create discourse, in ways we have barely begun to understand. Rheingold goes as far to say that this new mindset could possibly be the beginnings of a new system of economy, where companies are willing to share in order to access a more efficient market place.


But again we must ask ourselves, is this worth the loss of the, "rare, precious, and hard-won" style of friendship felt between the our ancestors? Do we want to live in a world of tedious status updates and inane tweets? Are we taking true friendship for granted?


The answers depend on how much you are willing to feed the machine. Some of us are ready and willing to enter the blogosphere and create a presence on the internet, and for them their loss is minimal. Deresiewicz's "three hour conversation" can just as easily happen anywhere on the internet as it could in our homes, and for the internet savvy generation of ours we know how to communicate through the internet as well as in person. However I personally believe in the importance of the distinction between friends, and "Facebook friends". 


The use of Bittorrent is commonly brought up when discussing the collaborative power of the internet, but how many of us know to whom we are seeding or downloading from? These collaborations may be increasing, but our interactions surely aren't. While social media has created great things in our world, it needs to be taken with a grain of salt. We cannot abandon the ability to communicate and collaborate in person, as much as we cannot condemn the advancement of the internet's ability to do the same.


In the end there is neither a right or wrong answer. The internet has opened many doors that shouldn't be closed, but we cannot allow it to close ones we have already gone through, lest we be trapped.