Is the word ‘friend’ becoming devalued what with all this social networking? With Twitter friends and Facebook friends….is it losing its meaning as a description of someone you even KNOW?

In her piece called “ The Age of Friend-aholics”  in the LA Times, writer Megan Daum makes the point that we’re diluting what it means to call someone a friend:

Call me geriatric or Amish or just uncool (I gave all that away last week when I admitted I thought Ne-Yo was a sushi place), but I think of a friend as an actual person with whom I have an actual history and who I enjoy actually seeing. It seems, however, that this is no longer the definition of “friend.”

A friend is someone on your Facebook page or in your Twitter circle. A friend is someone you might know personally but who could just as easily be the friend of a friend of some other Facebook friend you don’t actually know. In any case, these friends have been assigned value not necessarily because of anything they’ve actually done with you or for you, but because, well, they just exist in the world and so do you.

The idea of friendship, at least among the growing population of Internet social networkers, is to attain as many of these not-really-friends as possible. Hence, the alcoholism analogy, which I don’t make lightly. Like cheap wine, “friends” provide a high that can only be sustained by acquiring more and more of them. Quantity trumps quality.

But the fact remains that here, as in other economic markets, the dollar is losing its value. Not only do these “friendships” represent a shortcut to intimacy (thereby rendering it phony), they require a lot of maintenance. You have to keep Twittering, instant-messaging and texting lest you become a bad “friend.” As a result, for friendaholics and those showing signs of friendaholism, socializing is less akin to sharing life experiences than to sustaining a never-ending volley with multiple partners in a giant electronic tennis game.

Do you draw a line in the sand (!) between REAL friends and internet ones? Do you have Facebook ‘friends’ you’ve never even met? Is your friend dance card full or are you constantly trying to accumulate more?