Is it becoming harder to find friends and easier to find acquaintances?

Subject of the thread came from here:

I Just Want to Have Friends - Television Tropes & Idioms
7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable | Cracked.com

A probable reason this is so common in fictional media is the fact that a high amount of people consider themselves to have very few or no friends at all.^* some studies have shown that the majority of people have at most two good friends while 1/4 of people don’t have anyone they would trust with a huge secret.

What do you think? In the world of Facebook and the like is it becoming harder to find true friends in a sea of acquantiences or is it just as easy to find real friends as it was say 40 or 60 years ago? What does friendship mean today? What does it mean to you? Do you think it still means what it used to mean? How many friends do you consider friends and what makes them different from the acquaintances that you know?

I actually don't think it's harder to find friends per se. But as the second article states, it's easier to be lazy today: Real friends grind down your sharp edges. If you don't accept that, you'll never have a close relationship with anybody. The lazy comes into play by the fact that having your sharp edges ground down is hard work, sometimes even annoyingly so - for both parties.
So no, it's not harder, but I'm thinking many people simply don't invest what's needed today.

But as with everything else in life: You choose your own consequences. Pay up front or pay later, those are the choices you realistically have.

Maybe for the extraverts. I don't think an introvert would have trouble finding a good friend on the internet, nor would they care that they only had one or two.

Interesting. I have a bunch of acquaintances, but I always have. I pick my own friends, they don't pick me. This is kinda hypocritical, but I don't contact people; I wait for them to contact me. I figure if someone doesn't contact me to do something, then they don't want to hang out. lol

Perhaps we just have higher standards?

I'm one of those people with only two close friends I can trust with anything, and they're people I've known since at least high school.

Everyone I've met at college act too superficial with me, which is partly why I don't bother building any sort of friendships. I already have two friends I can trust with anything, why would I need more? Ironically, you would have to do more to honestly become what I would consider a 'friend'. As a result, I have few alternative friends, but that's all for the better if the only potential friends I find feign interest in what I have to say.

a true friend is always hard to find. no matter which century you live in. and that is what makes a true friend so valuable. friends, on the other hand, are easy to find. they can be your middle school classmates that you are still in contact with. or they can be the people that are around you, like neighborhood and stuff. those people can be consider as friends. acquaintances, can be your friend's friend, your cousin's friend, your boyfriend's/girlfriend's friend, these are the people that you know superficially.

that is how I define true friend, friends and acquaintances.

I have close friends, but these are not who I trust enough to reveal my secrets to. and I honestly don't know if I will ever find a true friend.

I do not think this is a new phenomena.

In social Studies back in High School.. We were taught that the average North American forms 3-6 lifetime friendship bonds outside of their family. The majority of these friendships will be formed after the age of 21.

People come and go. Values change. Life goes on.

I think this has more to do with the patterns in the concept of. maturity. The desire for "friends" is derived from our need to bond with others. Introverts may have it easier to bond with their life long friends earlier than extroverts since extroverts for the most part are hanging out with more people making it easier to form acquaintances for the extroverts. After a while of trial and error, extroverts learn friends come and go which goes on to them accepting that most people are acquaintances, their real friends are the ones that have always been there.