It's easier to friend someone than to be someone's friend. It's easier to like things than to love them. It's easier to say nothing — but people who become used to saying nothing become used to being nobody.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Middlebury College Commencement 2013, 2013
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In one of the speech's most striking passages, Foer traced the evolution of communication technology — from face-to-face contact to phone calls to voicemail to email to texting — arguing that each step forward in convenience has also made it slightly easier to avoid the emotional work of being present. He observed that we began to prefer these 'diminished substitutes' for genuine human connection. He then delivered this warning: that by accepting diminished substitutes for real engagement, we ourselves become diminished substitutes for our fully human selves. The progression from 'friend' as a verb to 'like' as a button to comfortable silence captures his concern that digital culture is training us to settle for shallow approximations of what it means to be truly connected to other people.
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