A close friend of mine is best described as the "walking encyclopedia". He knows the weirdest, most exotic facts, its history, its etymology, and related terms at any time of the day. Also he has the ability to tell all this in the most engaging, compelling way.
Strangely enough this friend of mine and I don't share direct interests. We walk in different social circles, have different hobbies, different ways of enjoying our free time. We were colleagues once and through these stories he tells, we remained friends.
With all this social media and ever-present digital connectivity going on I fear people of his ilk will soon no longer have a place in the community. We don't need a person in our circle to be a "walking encyclopedia". We have a smart phone for that now. And we care enough to share some esoteric facts, we just tag, snapshot, post a link on our twitter. In fact we don't need people to tell us in conversation where they've been and what they've done. I can look that up on foursquare, instagram or facebook.
Forget these old fashioned friendships now... we will find out soon enough we already make public 70% of our conversation topics, and the other 30% is either embarrassing, or plain old boring.
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