Facebook - The meaning of the word "friend" is changing?

Thank you all sharing your point of views on my latest post. Facebook seems to be a very popular topic lately, therefore I decided to write another post about it.

Many of you who commented on my last post were saying that Facebook has nothing to do with the real life, that people are totally capable of distinguishing between "online" and "offline". Is that really so?

I found a research on how people start to confuse their online friends for real friends. The research was conducted by Doug Fodeman and Marje Monroe in Manchester in 2009. They were studying the impact of Facebook on teenagers.


They discovered that the meaning of the word "friend" is changing for their students at the Brookwood School and this change puts them at risk in several ways.

According to their findings an average teenager has between 200 and 500 on Facebook. Some of their friends are complete strangers. Researchers think that teenagers need to be challenged to think about what a friend is and consider the ways we typically value friends. They believe that student's risks rise when they apply traditional real-life values to the "friendships" some of them develop online in sites such as Facebook.

They also point out that it isn't an age-appropriate or developmentally healthy place for children and younger teens to have Facebook accounts. Because Facebook is not working to protect children and the laws in country are terribly inadequate to safeguard children online, in general.

Is the meaning of word friend really changing?