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Faux Friendship (2009)
We are connected to everyone. We don’t really know anyone.
As industrialization uprooted people from extended families and traditional communities and packed them into urban centers, friendship emerged to salve the anonymity and rootlessness of modern life. Perhaps I need to surrender the idea that the value of friendship lies precisely in the space of privacy it creates: not the secrets that two people exchange so much as the unique and inviolate world they build up between them, the spider web of shared discovery they spin out, slowly and carefully, together. A recent book on the sociology of modern science describes a networking event at a West Coast university: “There do not seem to be any singletons–disconsolately lurking at the margins–nor do dyads appear, except fleetingly.” No solitude, no friendship, no space for refusal–the exact contemporary paradigm.
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