My thought on modern friends and technology

With all the new things that have come out in the past two decades its no secret that the internet is a great place to make friends, connect with them or reunite with old friends who may be living in different parts of the word. While the internet and other consumer products provides a a convenient way of understanding and interacting with the world as well as the people around it there are also certain circumstances that come with it.
In the past it was very common to go out with friends to movies, restaurants and bars but the standard has changed as it always does since there are a lot of ways to entertain indoors without the need to waste any more money. An example of these alternatives is video games, while in the past the games were clearly designed as a way to have fun at home instead of going to the arcade, the games these days have definitely evolved to a point were arcade games cannot keep up as they allow their users to connect and play together without the need for traveling which allows for even more enjoyable things like playing online with friends while drunk, knowing that there is no need to worry about driving because your’e already at home. The reason for this is because games made for consoles and computers have been designed strictly to impress the the player while walking in an arcade often feels like the games there are merely meant to fill the room, another reason is that its much more convenient to play on the couch with friends than to drive somewhere where you can receive the same amount of entertainment (probably less) as you would have staying home with your gaming console.

One thing that bothers me a lot when interacting with people from my generation in person is the use of a phone during a conversation, especially if its turns out that the person is networking or texting. While I have to accept that emergencies occur I would prefer to be told to wait a moment instead of being told “Carry on I’m listening” as I pause simply because its not the point of me pausing but rather because I need your eyes to read your responses to what I’m saying so I know if i’m offending or boring you but when a person pays attention to something else entirely like a phone it gives the impression of being disinterested and if that’s the case then understand that you are not the only person with a life, if you would rather not talk then so be but don’t make me speak while you respond to someone else I cant see. To me it seems like modern form of ethics, something which is very rare as the old ways of doing things become more and more irrelevant.

Like most people with a laptop or web browser enabled mobile device I signed up for Facebook and it was great, although I signed up much later than most people (around 2010) I still had a good experience with the website until I started looking at other peoples profiles. The first thing i noticed after the profile picture and name was the number of friends the person had, at the time i was a junior in high school and was shocked at the number of people a single person is actually capable of knowing. The average friend count for the people I knew was about 200 friends for boys and 450 friends for girls and I myself was sitting on a solid 12 friends. It immediately became a competition for me the average people, not because I wanted to know and become friends with at least 200 more people but because I didn’t want to be the guy who publicly has less friends than everyone else, knowing the dangers of communicating with complete strangers I decided to send a steady amount of of friend requests to people I had at least heard of and many of them had accepted within a matter of hours. After a few months of using Facebook I soon started to notice that a lot of younger people would accept friend request merely as a way to increase the number of friends on their Facebook and so was I. Sitting here now I longer have an account, not because I don’t like Facebook but because there are other things I could be doing and something new will come again as it always has with my generation.

Friendship is slowly beginning to orbit around technology and if not then it will be the other way around, either way I don’t expect the two ever separate if we progress as a species in terms of technological advancements and eventually, as many of us star wars fans wish, interstellar travel, we might need Facebook and twitter then to make pages for pictures of stars and obviously the occasional #FoundAPlanet