Here’s something that’s completely obvious: social media has totally changed the way we interact with others.

But now, here’s something that might not be so obvious: social media has changed our friendships – how we start them, how we maintain them, and even what we consider a friendship.

When you’re in pre-school and kindergarten, you choose your friends based on who is nice and shares their toys with you (and, if you believe in cooties, you avoid the opposite sex). If you meet a friend outside of school, it’s usually in a playgroup or activity arranged by your parents.

In grammar school and high school, you start finding friends with similar interests, both in school and at after-school activities. Generally these friends all live in your school district or at least your town, so the friends you make are at least partially based on your location. The field is even more narrowed if you consider that, based on where your school is and if it is public or private, or based on the activity you’re involved in, the friends you make may be from a certain class or socio-economic group, or of a particular race or background.

In college, though, there’s a whole world of new friendships opened. You can meet people from different places and completely different backgrounds than yourself. You won’t become friends with everyone, but you will encounter these different people in class, activities and social situations, some more often than others.

Social media, at least message boards and sites like Twitter, is a virtual college – it considerably expands your pool of potential friends and acquaintances, even more, in fact, than college does. It’s perfectly acceptable to “follow” or converse with people you do not know, because they have something to say that is interesting or relevant to your hobbies and interests, career or life.

(Due to some crazy, unspoken rules, however, most people would tell you that doing the same thing on Facebook is just plain creepy. You don’t friend those you don’t know, for the most part, but exceptions do occur. We could do an entire piece on social media etiquette because of this stuff.)

But social media doesn’t just alter how we start friendships. Once we have these virtual and real-life friendships, social media also affects how we keep them.

If you’re connected on Facebook and Twitter, if you have Skype, a cell phone, and an IM screen name, there’s virtually no way to feel disconnected from a friend, no matter how far away they are. Even if you catch up via a nightly or weekly phone call, doing so is completely different than it would have been 10 years ago. By the time that call comes, you’ll already know most of what’s going on thanks to social media or texting.

In fact, due to the nature of social media, we sometimes refer to people we’ve only talked on online as friends, only to then find ourselves fishing for an explanation of how and why we consider these people friends although we’ve never actually met because others think it’s strange.

I do find the whole online friendship thing a little odd, but that doesn’t mean I don’t do it. I’ve never met the other writers on this site because I don’t live in Boston, but I know that if I were to meet them, we’d probably soon be talking like we’ve known each other forever – because of social media.

And just because I find it odd doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it. Twitter allows me to find funny and interesting information and share it with other people, like I would in a conversation. Skype makes it so much easier to keep in touch with a friend in China. And Facebook and IM allowed me to keep in touch while I was away at school without running up a huge cell phone bill.

That’s not to say we don’t appreciate the importance of real-world interaction. We really do. No matter how a friendship begins, it cannot develop through instant messages and Twitter updates alone.

But I’m grateful that social media makes it all a little bit easier.

(Originally published on The Next Great Generation)