It used to be that friendship was about respecting others. It was about helping each other through the hard times. Now, friendship is dependent on how the individual person views one's friends, rather than how the person is viewed by others. This is evidence of how we are becoming increasingly individualistic.
We treat our friends as people to be used. It is all about how many friends we have, not how many people who we are a friend of. The idea of friendship is to give each other personal pleasure and to gain personal desires. Friends are now, as understood in the postmodern sense as people to have fun with. One has to have more friends to have more fun, meaning more pleasure.
The activities that we enjoy with friends has become a status symbol. Gaining, not making "friends" is a point-scoring activity. People talk about who is their friend, not who are they friends with. Social life has become a norm to show-off one's popularity, instead of helping others with their needs. As a result, gaining friends has become a political tool for people to gain influence and control over others.
No longer do we feel satisfied about ourselves, but we are concerned with what others think about us. To feel more popular, we look at how many friends we have to feel assured about social status.
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