To begin this essay I started by asking myself the question; What is a friend? To answer that question I would say that a friend is someone who loves you and needs you just as much as you love and need them, who you can share your feelings and thoughts with, can have fun with, and can call at random just to talk. When thinking about this it came clear to me that I have many different types of friends, which I have divided into three groups for clearing things out. One group that is my closest friends that I share pretty much everything with. The other that includes friends that I meet and call on regularly basis but as I wouldn’t refer to as best friends and the third which includes people I would refer to as friends but which I don’t meet often or even talk to on the phone regularly for different reasons.
So with this background I will go back to the question for this seminar; can virtual friends replace our real friends? Are we less dependent of human relationships these days? In one of my previous essays I mentioned that in the global society of today we connect and meet so much more people compared to just a few decades ago. We have the opportunity to travel a lot and see the world which makes our social connections even larger. I believe that different social medias like for example Facebook can in a certain degree help us to easier maintain certain social connections, but in general it is mostly the friends that I defined in group number three that really needs this help. This is the friends that we probably would loose contact with if it weren’t for the social medias. Our closer friends on the other hand which I defined in group number one and two are people that never can be replaced by technology. I don’t believe that sites like Facebook are replacing these real friends with virtual friends because a friend in the real world posses so many qualities that can’t possible be reflected on the Internet. These sites rather help us to connect with people on a more shallow level.
And so I will end this short essay with a quote:
“Life is a balancing act; a friend is the safety net. Love may make the world go around, but a real friend keeps you from falling off.”
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Hi Angelica!
ReplyDeleteI must say that I enjoyed reading your essay. It made me think about my friends, just like you did before writing your piece. I liked the fact that you defined your friends into three different categories, even though I have never done that myself. My belief is that these kinds of relationships are very dynamic and change over time. Also, unfortunately, there might be circumstances that do not give you the ability to keep in touch as much as you want to. Maybe there is a emotional dimension to this too? I have friends which I like a lot but we don’t phone each other that much anymore. They have gotten jobs, girlfriends and live in another part of the country. But I would still call them close friends.
I liked the quotation at the end. There is another quote that also fits well into this I think. You discuss the reciprocity in the relations and that it is a vital factor, that is that a friend should love you as much as you love them. Why is that? The definition of yourself should not only consist of how others perceive you, but how you perceive yourself. Yeah, that’s right, the quote, almost forgot. From the excellent movie Adaptation: “You are what you love and not what loves you”.
/Johan Östberg