I don't think we had friends halfway across the globe back then. And if you did, you might not hear about them dying for months. We can now build social "netw

I don't think we had friends halfway across the globe back then. And if you did, you might not hear about them dying for months. We can now build social "networks" which are much less locality based, and where your friends aren't necessarily friends with each other. And that's good. It does mean that you've got less redundancy in the system though. Which is why it's not unreasonable to use new tools like facebook to keep up to date with people.