Friendship and Aristotle

The world of friendship has evolved into a different species. No longer can you regularly hold a deep conversation with ease. This is due to the changes in human nature and the means with which we communicate. Many people have shifted their nature in order to strive for their "dreams" and "goals" of fame and fortune- or in other words "success"- as dicta ted by today's society. Now it is easier to believe that many "friends" will do anything to get a step up in the world over being a virtuous person and friend. This is further enabled to be the case due to communication methods and barriers. On average, a group of people in their teens to earlier twenties will spend more time and have a more extensive conversation with the people they are texting rather than the ones who accompany them at any given time. How can true friendship of the good and virtuous exist in a world where we do not even enjoy the company of one another enough to pay attention to them?. Communication is now instant but at what cost? Sure there are emoticons to express "feelings" but what does a text truly tell you about how you or the other person is feeling? Having a pleasure friendship, as described previously, becomes meaningless. It becomes easier to misinterpret a text and think that the friend is angry or in love or anywhere in between. Half of the time a text leads to more communication issues due to the simple fact each text can be read many different ways depending on which parts the reader chooses to stress. This leads to more strife and conflict in friendships than there would be with regular face to face interactions. Another disturbing fact is that almost half of relationships are dissolved in means other than face to face communication, such as texting. This is done this way because it provides a barrier to the human emotions and prevents people from actually caring about the person they are dissolving the relationship with. This barrier creates superficial relationships with many people we might actually deem to be our closest friends. The bonds of friendship and trust in one another are no longer deep as it was many years ago. This phenomenon is occurring because of the direct correlation between social networking sites and how the youth have been influenced by these new methods of communication. People can choose other forms of technological networks to communicate and meet new people. For example, you can become friends with people you actually know in real life or people