"Friends" vs. friends
In the mid-19th century, when telegraphy was becoming more widespread, a man entered the telegraph office of Bangor, Maine, carrying a message to be sent that he had written down on a piece of paper. The operator took the piece of paper, manipulated the telegraph key and then placed the paper on the hook. The customer complained that message had not been sent - after all, he could still see it hanging on the hook.
James Gleick tells this anecdote in his fascinating book "The Information" to illustrate that the arrival of a novel communication technology always brings along problems of definition and language: "A message had seemed to be a physical object. That was always an illusion; now people needed consciously to divorce their conception of the message from the paper on which it was written."
Similar problems arise with today's new communication technologies: The fact that the people we form relationships with on Facebook (and many other platforms) are called "friends" is the source for a lot of confusion. Obviously, the Facebook "friends" are not the same as friends, in much the same way as the piece of paper is not the message that was being transmitted through the telegraph. On Facebook, "friendship" is binary and stable; the concept of friendship we're used to can have many different states and change over time.
But because language influences strongly how we think, we are having difficulty differentiating between two entirely different concepts that bear the same name. The "friendship" concept in the digital realm is measured against the better-known concept of friendship, and deemed either insufficient - or outright dangerous.
