I doubt there is a child alive in the Western world today who knows what a friend is.

What is a friend?

A friend is trustworthy, dependable, honest. A friend is loyal and respects your beliefs. A friend listens, helps, and expects an ear in return. A friend is accountable, honorable, venerable. Friends assist each other in times of hardship–physically, mentally, and emotionally.

The concept of friendship has changed dramatically in the last 10 years. Friendship. Changing. This is ludicrous. Friendship has meant the same thing since the dawn of human civilization, but it’s not the same now. The concept of a “friend” now has no meaning whatsoever. A “friend”, in practice, differs in little way from a “stranger”, and in no way whatsoever from an “acquaintance”.

Why is this? The answer is obvious. Social networking.

What is a “friend” on a social networking platform? A friend is a faceless entity. Sure, you can see a picture of the entity, but the picture changes rapidly. The picture does not perpetually reflect the emotions and behaviors of the person it portrays. The picture is brushed, touched up, edited, filtered, or otherwise changed to better reflect the internal perception of the person it portrays, rather than being the clean, open visage of a personal meeting.

A friend is an emotionless entity. You communicate with your “friend” through text on a screen. The text cannot convey emotion as well as voice, and without a face with which to place the emotion perceived in the text, an accurate portrayal of the communication cannot be had. Even if the emotion is written out by the person expressing it, their belief in what they are feeling may differ from their actual feeling, and this may be only discoverable through face to face communication. Compounding the problem, the text is often presented with incorrect spelling and using no system of grammar whatsoever. Spelling and grammar are not mere conventions and politeness; they’re representative of one’s ability to effectively impart an idea.

A friend is an intangible entity. You cannot shake their hands, hug them when they cry, hold them back when they want to fight, or offer an arm up when they fall. You cannot see them, hear them, touch them, or smell them. Please don’t taste your friends; that's degeneracy. You cannot compare their height to yours, their bodies to yours; you can’t weigh their abilities or the actions to match their words out of anything but memory.

A friend is someone you may never, EVER meet. A celebrity is not your friend, even if he accepted your “friend request”. A friend is someone with whom you may never speak, or with whom you only speak once. A friend is someone you only saw once. A friend is someone you will never see again.

A friend is one of several thousand people who, ostensibly, mean something to you. Except they do not. Because they cannot. Definitionally. The human mind can only make stable social connections to, at most, roughly 150 people. Sound a bit high to me, personally, but that’s what the studies say. What do we see with social networking? Hundreds–thousands–of “friends”. Not only do they have no social presence in your life (due to their intangible, emotionless nature), you could not make that many connections as your brain cannot handle them.

This is, of course, the point.

“But wait,” you say, “these things are not new. Letters have existed for millennia–physical photographs since the 1820s. And circumstances do not always allow friends to remain in proximity for their entire lives, and there may be instances in which a friend is still considered, despite never seeing him again in either of your lives. How does a social networking platform differ from these historic means of communication with friends?”

It differs in these ways: speed, permanence, and penetration.

Historically, letters took time–days, weeks, or months–to get where they were going. An e-mail or social networking message is, ostensibly, sent within seconds. Letters were once used out of necessity only. Now they’re often the norm, simply because they’re “easier”.

Social networks rise and fall in popularity, but the idea behind their means of communication has been shown to the public, and so the idea remains. Once MySpace, now Twitter and Facebook. In the future? Hopefully nothing, but without certainty of the date of the Collapse, we must assume there will be a successor.

Social networks claim hundreds, thousands, millions, a billion users. Businesses use them for advertising. Governments for agendas. News agencies for lies. There are things you cannot do on the Internet without an account with a social network. As an aside on this topic, social networks are something of a “mark of the beast” in this regard. “Like us on Facebook” (and this brings into question, too, the redefining of what the word ‘like’ means. Lord save us, for we are now Orwell’s nightmare), “Follow us on Twitter”, etc. Seen in print, audio, and video ads, even outside the Internet. The idea is to make it impossible to get away from the network, even if you don’t use it.

In the past, if you physically left someone forever, your connection waned. Eventually communication became impossible, their presence in your life became too small, and they dropped off your radar. You could not look to them for help, as to explain the events that led up to the help you needed would take too long, and the written word could not convey those events with justice. Now, the connection is designed to never be broken. You can leave a person in your friend list and never speak to them. You cannot delete your social networking account at all. These names and accounts grow and grow into a nameless, shapeless, formless mass. Just a number, ever increasing, and every time the “list of friends” is viewed, that number grinds into the subconscious, “This is the number of friends I have. These people are my friends. Their presence (lack thereof, rather) in my life is what defines friendship.”

For those of us who know why this would be done, purposefully, this revelation comes as no surprise. Unfortunately, the lack of surprise we express at learning a new aspect of the scheme is also a tool in their arsenal. We can become desensitized to the sheer number of subversions and feel overwhelmed, unsurprised, and not called to action against them. Never forget that this is part of the plan.

For the rest of those reading, perhaps this will alert you to the wider scheme. If you are unable or unwilling, psychologically, to accept who is doing it, please still accept that it is happening. You can still help correct the degradation and awaken others to it. When it all comes crashing down, those responsible, whomever they may be, will receive their just rewards. All because you saw the truth of the actions and events, even if you did not believe who was perpetuating them.

~:~

Hey, those’re my thoughts, at least. Anything I should add? What am I missing? Qs and Cs, all the way. Post ‘em if you have ‘em.