glue planning

Friendship

Let's talk about online friendship.
It's obvious that users of My Space feel they have lots of online friends. But is the definition of friend the same  online as it is offline? I'd say it isn't, that there's one big distinction. For me, an offline friend is someone who knows you, warts and all, and in spite of all your faults is still your friend. And vice versa of course. With an offline you can't pretend to be anything but what you are. Whereas with your online friends, they only the aspects of you that you choose to show. That means you can pretend to have qualities you don't really have, or you can big up one part of your personality/interests in a way that might create a very different impression of what you are really like. And I also think it means that you might have more friends because you can focus on just one aspect in one relationship and develop lots of different one-dimensional relationships that wouldn't stand up to scrutiny in an offline relationship.
Still trying to think through what this means: more opportunities to appeal to the hobbyist in all of us? How to leverage those bigger social networks?
What do y'all think? Do you agree with the basic premise?

Anomaly NYC - recon newsletter

As much as I can work out, Anomaly are an ad agency who believe that advertising isn't always the answer, which is a good thought. Anyway they produce these thought piece journals which aren't bad at all, esp for quotable stats e.g.

Consumer spending on media overakes advertiser spending on media:
The study stated that consumer spending on media at $178.4bn, an increase of 6.5%, surpassed advertising, which grew by a mere 3.2% to $175.8bn in 2003.

PDFs are available here:
Download Recon_vol_1.pdf
Download Recon_vol_2.pdf

or you can find out more at anomaly NYC's website.