According to David Holmes’ research up to 40% of the information displayed on MySpace is fabricated. Holmes believes that many people are being brutalised by the online experience of assuming you can trust someone and suddenly finding you cannot. One day you are pouring your heart out to a virtual buddy, and the next this “soulmate” is simply gone.

They got bored, or found someone else, or simply switched off. It is no semantic detail that users often talk of “friending” rather than befriending.

As well, a third of people on social networking sites give false information about themselves, according to emedia. Why all this ‘lying’? They say they are worried about the security of their personal data. Falsification maintains privacy, though of course also undermines the value of social networking sites. Or again, according to recent YouGov research, ten percent of teenagers said they have been bullied online, by being bombarded with instant messages and emails that make their life a misery.

The “casual callousness” of the Internet is partly at work here. Who has clicked ‘Ignore’ on Facebook? Someone contacted you whom you hardly know or even don’t much like. In the real world, such callousness is usually avoided because you can read the signs and avoid the direct confrontation. Online, the issue is forced. You have to give the virtual cold shoulder.

Anyone who has received an email that struck them as blunt understands this reaction. Yet, now that some send a cancellation, a rejection, even a notice of dismissal by email – on the grounds that it is more efficient – the world can seem a little less humane, less friendly.

Online living is deskilling us, found MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle. We are less able to be alone, or manage and contain our emotions. Instead, we are developing new intimacies with machines that lead to new dependencies – a wired social existence, ‘a tethered self’. Paradoxically, online friendship hovers between communication and solipsism.

Yet, for good and ill, the Internet is as much a part of modern friendship as a pint of beer or a phone. The answer is to be wiser not about the Internet but about friendship. What is it, what does it take, what are its perils as well as its promise?

Professor Ray Pahl, for example, studied how people use Blackberrys. He found that they are used to keep people at bay as well as to stay in touch with those they love.

Yet at an experimental village in Canada where all the houses were wired to make getting online as fast as turning on the telly, neighbours physically met up more as a result.

There is a vital difference between apparent friendliness and friendship – and between different kinds of friends, from work colleagues, through people in the pub, to personal soulmateship. Hold onto this hierarchy because if friendship is flattened human life is eroded too. And friendship is what’s most vital for happiness according to Aristotle.

Then the practice of differentiating the kinds of friendships – and deepening them – might begin where we face the greatest “newness” – online. For starters, why not take this Friendship Intelligence Test?

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