Defining Your Friends

Human relationships used to be easy: you had friends, boy- or girlfriends, parents, children, and landlords. Now, thanks to social media, it’s all gone sideways. I decided to try to index these new entities—to draft a sort of Social Media Bestiary. Here it is, so far: The friend you know well, have encountered frequently in the flesh, perhaps even hugged; the friend you sort of know, because you have friends in common and have maybe attended the same events—not together; the friend, or friend-like entity, whom you met initially via Facebook or Twitter or Goodreads or, heaven help us, MySpace.