Old friends never die, nor do they fade away

Scott Brown at Wired exam­ines the always-growing econ­omy of friend­ship on social net­work­ing sites like Facebook, where dig­i­tal per­ma­nence makes los­ing touch nearly impos­si­ble.

We squir­rel away Friends the way our grand­par­ents used to save nickels—obsessively, des­per­ately, as if we’ll run out of them some day... Friends are the cur­rency of the socially net­worked world; there­fore, it fol­lows that more equals better.

Losing touch with friends, let­ting those old junior high friend­ships die their quiet deaths, is “sweet and sad and though you’d rarely admit it, necessary.”