24 December 2007

Mutual Grooming

I loved this story on Guardian Unlimited. I’ve talked about herd behaviour before on this blog, and this is yet another example of a similar thing. It seems that the richness of a relationship is no longer important, simply the volume of friends we have. Ironically, you could have 500 ‘friends’ online and yet be incredibly lonely because you end up not knowing a single one of them really well. And it’s a similar situation in virtual worlds, you end up knowing someone’s online persona, without a single clue as to who they are or what they’re really like. Does that make them your friend?

We moan about the BBC being dumbed down, but we should worry much more about this dumbing down of our relationships!

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