Remember back when the only way to talk with your friends when you weren’t with them was to call them on a landline phone? (I still find it weird that less than ten years ago, we still talked on phones with cords attached to the wall.) Granted, when I was a kid, most of my friends lived within walking/biking distance from my house, but it’s still amazing to think about how few communication options there were. On one hand, it’s nice that now I can easily keep up with friends who are 1,500+ miles away. But at the same time, how meaningful and deep can our Facebook-only friendships, for example, possibly be?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently and decided to count how many people I interact with in each form of communication I use, organizing them from those requiring very little effort and sincerity (Twitter) to those requiring much effort and sincerity (love letters).

Twitter: 260 followers
On Twitter, I’m rarely talking to any one person in particular. Most of what I say is just nonsense that’s so vague it doesn’t matter who reads it. Occasionally, people will respond to my tweets, but the primary purpose is merely an outlet for my ramblings. Also, about half of my 260 followers are probably restaurants and spam bots.

Facebook: 87 friends.
This number is down from roughly 300 after I recently deleted all the weirdos and idiots that I had no desire to interact with. I like Facebook for sharing photos with friends and posting links to friends and for interacting with friends who still don’t know what Twitter is. But besides that, Facebook is honestly just a tool to keeps tabs on what everyone is doing. For example, my mom will often ask me to update her on certain people, asking which of my acquaintances have gotten married/had babies/had mental breakdowns recently.

Texting: About 30 friends
I scanned my contacts list on my phone and counted up the people that I would text on any given day. Not to say I ever text all 30 people in the same day, but that’s roughly the number of people I would be comfortable contacting at any given moment. However, most text conversations aren’t very serious. And any time I have gotten into very serious talks through texting, it always seems to get out of hand with one person misinterpreting just one word and throwing the whole thing out of whack.

Phone calls: 2.5 friends
I talk to only two people on the phone regularly. If almost anyone else calls me, I don’t answer the phone. I added a half a point because I have one friend who I will occasionally chat with on the phone but I don’t answer her calls 80% of the time (rude, I know). And yes, one of the two people I talk to regularly is my mom.

Video chatting: 0 friends
FaceTime and Skype and whatnot are a form of communication even more intense than talking on the phone, where you can still be doing other things and not really listening. If you’re not listening while video chatting, the other person will definitely know. Plus, you have to provide all the proper facial expressions and reactions. Naturally, this concept is still strange to me and I don’t enjoy it. But I definitely have friends who always talk about skyping.

Love letters: 0
I say love letters because I can’t imagine writing a hate letter. Seems bad to put death threats in writing like that. But I remember when all of my friends and I wrote letters to each other all the time, in middle school and even some in high school. And I still have some of those that I hold on to. You know what I don’t have? All my old text messages. And Facebook could erase my old messages any time it wanted.

People need to communicate. That is certain. But is making it so easy to communicate really the best way to evolve? Or is it simply making us more and more distant to one another to the point where no one will ever speak in person? It will be like Wall-E where the two fat guys are right next to each other yet still chatting on the computer.

- Lauren Miller