How many friends have you got? Me? One hundred and sixty-six. That’s a lot of friends you may think, but I know people who have thousands. Out of my list I have actually met sixty-four face to face, the rest I am unlikely ever to see in the flesh. Why? Because they are my Facebook friends, I have another hundred or so with many duplicates on Orkut, fifty or sixty in various scale modeling chat-rooms and thirty-eight on Skype. My ‘virtual’ friends have long outnumbered my ‘real’ friends and living far from my own country and family members the majority of my social interaction with them is over the internet. I recently met, for real, a person I had until then only known as a cyber-mate and was immediately struck by the qualitative difference in the nature of the relationship. We will meet again and this is a cyber-friend who will cross the divide and become ‘real’ – others won’t and some will suffer that ultimate social ostracism – they will be de-friended.

‘De-friending’ is the modern equivalent of ‘breaking it off’, the fracture of a relationship be it close or far, but one which was based on actual contact, proximity and awareness. Periodically I go through my list of Facebook friends and have a cull. I may boot dozens from my friends’ list to the obvious surprise of some and the irritation of others. Why do they get the order of the boot? A variety of reasons; from me suspecting that they are not who they claim to be in the mini-biography that goes with the Facebook page, or because I don’t like the views they express or the causes they espouse. Or simply because there has been zero interaction since we ‘friended’ one-another. And there they are gone.

They came at the flick of a button and went with the same. There was no awkward discussion sitting in a cafe or a public park where I might have to look these people in the eye, sense their rejection, their hurt or puzzlement at my casting them aside. There are no memories of them, how they might sit, what their habits were, whether they took sugar in their tea. There is little or no emotional luggage that goes with these one-click ‘friendships’.

But this is not true of all my cyber-relationships at least two of which do much to sustain me through thick and thin. We are grumpy old men, similar in age and outlook, liking many of the same things in life, and have been together for over eight years. A bond has developed between the three of us that transcends the trivial and we look to each other for support and friendship. One is in Canada, the other in the US. I don’t expect ever to meet either, but I feel closer to them than some ‘real’ friends I have known for far longer.

As the internet becomes a more layered experience and we are now able so see the person we speak to, to open windows on our lives and ourselves that we never could before, then there is emerging a type of cyber relationship that has real depth, tangible emotion and true value. The intriguing thing is that the quality of those relationships is determined by how close they come to physical interaction in the real world. The ‘messenger’ friends are never as ‘real’ as the Skype friends - and none of them beat coffee and cakes with a real friend who came out of cyberspace and into a world where clicking them out of existence is not an option.