How To Make Friends and Hang Out With People

The Washington Post takes a look at some web -based ways to meet friends and go do stuff. I've never engaged in any formal online activities explicitly oriented around friend-making, but I do owe several of my friends to the quasi-social online activity known as blogging, and when you add in friends of friends in various degrees, blogging is probably the biggest avenue through which I know anyone. This is, I think, an under-recognized aspect of the internet. Since typing away is a solitary activity, time spent on the web is often conceptualized as a substitute for interacting with people. More realistically, though, the internet actually substantially decreases the search costs associated with getting to know people and facilities meatspace interactions.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/06/how-to-make-friends-and-hang-out-with-people/42738/