Facebook Study

According to British researchers, it's hard to make close friends on Facebook.

Read the article here.

This study found that social networking sites like Facebook aren't creating many close friendships, but are creating 'plenty of meaningless ones'.

I can see that because personally I don't think an email only interaction qualifies as a relationship, at least not in the sense of a true friendship. To be fair though, what constitutes a meaningful relationship is completely relative and different for many folks.

That being said, the internet is really just a reflection of society in general. If a certain tendency, behaviour, attitude, movement, business, sexual kink, school of thought etc. exists in our society, then it exists on the internet.

This includes relationships. It would make sense to me that if we are seeing an increase of what some might describe as 'meaningless' friendships or relationships, then our society outside of the computer is also conducive to us creating these equally meaningless relationships. If it's not an increase and simply is part of human nature, then we, as people, have a tendency to create frivolous friendships which is magnified through the general anonymity of the internet. Either way it's all good cuz it's just us.

Put another way, social networking tools like Facebook don't create meaningless relationships, people do. :)