The word friend has been bastardized by social networks. From Tom at MySpace (your first MySpace friend, remember?) to the friend requests you get daily from people you never meet; we’ve changed what it means to be a friend.  It’s a shame we don’t have a better word for it – LinkedIn comes close with ‘connections’ – because true friendship, as this article argues, is not about collection (how many friends do I have?) nor about gain (am I friends with Chris Brogan? and what can he do for me?) but of a more enriching relationship steeped in the past of shared experience and built on a blurred sense of self.

It may be reassuring to look at Facebook and see your 700 friends, but how many of them will come sit by your side incapacitated in the hospital?  The article, and I, both suggest that this latter number is the more important and most fulfilling.

Friendships worthy of the name are different. Their rhythm lies not in what they bring to us, but rather in what we immerse ourselves in. To be a friend is to step into the stream of another’s life. It is, while not neglecting my own life, to take pleasure in another’s pleasure, and to share their pain as partly my own. The borders of my life, while not entirely erased, become less clear than they might be. Rather than the rhythm of pleasure followed by emptiness, or that of investment and then profit, friendships follow a rhythm that is at once subtler and more persistent. This rhythm is subtler because it often (although not always) lacks the mark of a consumed pleasure or a successful investment. But even so, it remains there, part of the ground of our lives that lies both within us and without.

via Roberto Greco’s Delicious Feed & original article: Friendship in an Age of Economics – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com.