What is a friend? Some one with whom you share your lunch box? Someone who agrees to whatever you say? Someone with whom you go to Guitar Class? Someone who does your homework? Or someone who shares his Physics Practical Lab book results with you?
Well if yes then Gaurav is my best friend even though his mother cooks lunch for only him. My neighbor whom I consider to be a loser agrees to whatever I say. Subhojit and I went to Guitar class and loved same kind of music but never talked apart from class hours. My mother helped with my home work whenever I was stuck but I would copy the class topper’s Physics homework because he was the best but he was not my best buddy. He shares it with me because he feels that he might need my help in Chemistry or Math.
There are different levels of dependencies that you have in life and you know who can provide a solution. There are problems and there are solutions. And these solution providers who are not necessarily related by blood, we choose to call them friends. But the degree of friendship varies and I strongly feel that the virtual (online) world has not been able to depict these degrees of differences in a correct manner.
I have a close group of friends with whom I grew up and they are spread all across the globe in the present day scenario. But they are always by my side, through my thick and thin and would any day quit their job and join my startup if I asked them to do so. I don’t intend to make any more additions to this list.
My online friendship pretends to map my real life friendship but I think it is nowhere close . I have all these people in my list on whom I depend in different degrees but they all come out to be on the same level. My best buddies though present in my list but I end up calling them more than leaving scraps. Walther and co. says, we use Facebook to keep in touch with family and friends, make new connections, learn about someone new, or glean information about prospective employees. I would agree that I use facebook to stay in touch with friends and family especially when I am geographically distant. Sharing of photographs made possible with this media adds a whole new dimension to the relationship which cannot be done on phone. My family is interested in catching up with all the new places I visit in US. I do make new connections based on my network, but they are people I generally know and are seldom unknown. Sometimes I agree to being friends with people from my Alma Mater whom I don’t know. I have also appreciated mentoring request from my juniors in my college. But when I require to find out about someone, I would rather seek opinions from my friends in my list than looking into the other guy’s profile. If I were to make an employment decision, I would seriously not rely on Facebook but LinkedIn will be my choice. I believe that people have different roles and different personalities and I would not like to merge these boundaries by creating one single impression. There are different tools to do different things. I would surely not use a spoon to fry my eggs.
