One is that these new media provide ways of maintaining friendships under circumstances where, in the past, those friendships would have quietly died because it was no longer possible to meet face to face.

In terms of their ratings of emotional closeness to their former friends, it took at most six months’ separation for a friend to drop down a layer in the friendship circles when people moved away.

Julie Beck wrote about friendship and delineates three different types of friendship, active, dormant, and commemorative. Active friendships are the ones where you keep in touch regularly and can rely on them for emotional support. Dormant friendships are the ones where there's a shared history, so you haven't spoken a while, but you still consider