There are two groups of people who will read this blog.

The first, will walk away from it nodding their collective heads and understanding exactly what I am talking about. The second group will sigh and wonder how, in the greatest country on earth, this is what we have been reduced to.

I was "unfriended" last week. Most of you will recognize that as a social media term used to describe the act of deleting someone from your list of followers/followees on Facebook. My Facebook friends list generally fluctuates around 150 people made up primarily of those I went to high school with, family members and people whose lives I find interesting to follow.

Among my "friends" I might guess only 30 are my true friends. The rest include people I have never met, some who I have not seen in more than two decades, and my first-grade teacher, who I tracked down because he is the finest educator I have ever met. It was in his class that I first learned about writing. We actually "published" our own books, one of which I still have to this day. It was about my guinea pig named George — riveting stuff, but I digress.

I offer this as background because when you only have 30 friends and lose one of them, its a numbers game, and it gives you pause to wonder. This particular friend had stopped returning my phone calls three weeks earlier, didn't respond to my emails and had gone incommunicado. His absence did not go unnoticed. After all, he had lived with my wife and I for a spell back in New Hampshire, I was the best man at his wedding and to say we had spent a lot of time together would be an understatement.

But, at my age, I took his apparent fall of the face of the earth in stride. After all, friends come and go — even good ones — and so I chalked it up to just that, and moved on. That was, until I logged on to my Facebook account last week.

Being a fairly prolific poster, I had continued to see his daily thoughts long after he had dropped by the wayside. Yet on this particular day, there was nothing to be found. None of his music postings that are so prevalent. No shop talk about his business, no pictures of his family, nothing. Nada. Zilch. The reporter in me was curious so I typed in his name and went to his page. Gasp. Say it isn't so. The option to "add friend" appeared on the page. It seems he had "unfriended" me.

This is what I found most fascinating. Though I was disappointed when it became apparent that my friend had now joined the group with the surname former, when I saw it on Facebook, it hit me much harder. Suddenly I felt sad. It was depressing. I went into a bit of a funk. After all, it is 2011. Lose a friend, move on. But lose him on Facebook and it is an entirely different story.

This is weird. Is it a symbol of what we have become? A society so shut off from the real world in favor of technology that we no longer call, we text. We no longer visit, we Skype. We don't send holiday cards to relatives, we post photo albums to Facebook. Meet a friend for coffee to discuss the issues of the day? Who has time. I'll just follow him on Twitter.

Ten years ago — heck five years ago, the loss of a friend of this caliber would have been devastating. But today, in our tech-driven world, I had already moved on. That is, until the unfathomable happened. This got me wondering. What about mutual friends. Would they follow suit? Was it a matter of picking sides, like when you break-up and shared friends are forced to choose? Would this one friend lead to the loss of six more cyber friends? Just as my head began to spin from the possibilities, I realized, it was quite possible that I was insane. Was I really having this conversation in my head? Seriously?

So I did what any rational reporter who is thinking about blogging on a pop culture topic like Facebook would do — I sought out an expert opinion. But my expert wasn't available before deadline, so I did the next best thing: I consulted my "friends" on Facebook.

From this informal poll I determined two things: A) I am, perhaps a bit crazy and B), I'm not alone. It seems that though in my case, I was dealing with a friend, this phenomenon of validation through Facebook actually has a name in dating circles. A friend of mine, who works as an adjunct professor at a local college says there is something known as "Facebook official." Excuse me?

Well, it goes like this. In 2011, you can date a person, and as a young lady, you might think you are in a relationship. But, the true sign is when the young fellow updates his relationship status on Facebook to include a link to you. Once this happens you are Facebook official.

In a strange way, this bit of news made me feel better. It appeared that my former friend's decision to "unfriend" me meant that what was already the case had simply become Facebook official.

The upside to this, is that making new friends in real life can involve lots of work. I'm too old to make lots of new friends. But in the land of the Facebook, I simply clicked a few buttons, found a friend of a friend from my last newspaper, and voila, my friend list was back to 152. Now, I can sleep easy. I think.