The reductive effect of 'friending' results in less humanity, more aggregation.

My 12-year-old stepdaughter gloriously announced to me that she has 256 friends on Facebook, I was ready to answer back that I have 368 when I was struck by a thought.

How many friends do I have?

The meaning of friendship has altered in the “Facebook Era”. In order to create a profile on a social networking site, you have to reduce your personality in a set of database entries (age, gender, relationship status, political views, religion etc.) in order to communicate with your “friends”.

Think about that for a second:

Reducing your personality in order to make friends…

When I was growing up it was the opposite, you had to enrich your personality in order to meet interesting people. Suddenly it became fashionable to aggregate the expressions of people into dehumanized data. There are so many things wrong with this trend, that it takes a whole book to summarize them. Here’s just one problem: It screws the middle class. Only the aggregator (like Google, for instance) gets rich, while the actual producers of content get poor. This is why newspapers are dying. It might sound like it is only a problem for creative people, like musicians or writers, but eventually it will be a problem for everyone. When robots can repair roads someday, will people have jobs programming those robots, or will the human programmers be so aggregated that they essentially work for free, like today’s recording musicians?

The debate about the relationship between computers and we human beings will have people talking and arguing for years into the future. One of the most unique voices in that debate is Jaron Lanier with his book You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto.

Read the book. It's a survival guide for the 21st century.