I found your comments about "virtual friends" particularly interesting. Having been an online gamer to varying degrees of obsession since the late 80's, I know what it's like to have online "friends" with whom you "socialize" on a daily basis and even work together in "guilds" towards a common goal. As game technology has advanced from text-based, multi-user-dungeons, such games now incorporate graphic player images, clothing, tattoos, hairstyles and real voice-over-audio chat. Sometimes your guild-mates actually talk to you real-time in-game. And that's just the gamer geek stuff. I remember when my teen-ager was first using instant messaging and I kept a close eye on his friends list. I would say "who is Jordan?" and he would say "oh, that's Mark's cousin in Dallas..." many friends of friends became his online friends. He still keeps up (virtually) with a kid that he met in Mexico about seven years ago. In this era of text messaging, cell phones, email, IM, Facebook and Myspace having a "real" conversation (let alone breaking bread) is beginning to be a lost commodity. I have observed a shift in social dynamics in both my own generation and in the next. I am sure that hundreds of papers are being written about the sociology of this era right now, but I've experienced the shift in phenomenon first hand and find it...interesting.

Imagine what an impact the wireless had on communication. Then the telephone. Now look at where we are - you can literally have an immediate exchange with your brother on the other side of the country instantaneously. But at the same time, you can have an instant exchange with someone you've never met...or a friend from elementary school whom you haven't actually spoken to in 20 years. So who quantifies which relationship is actually "real"?