How did people get too busy to make friends?

Personally, I blame "social networking." I find that term completely ludicrous. First MySpace and FaceBook, now with Twitter, people are becoming more and more accustomed to the idea that a complete conversation need be no longer than a status update or a tweet. For my part, I refuse (on both philosophical and safety grounds) to have a profile on any of those three or any other similar sites. With my own friends (there are, speaking honestly, three of them, one of whom is my roommate), I only use my phone to contact them and set up when we are going to spend actual, real-world time together. This does result in only seeing one of my three friends once a month or (sometimes) less...but it's the price I pay to maintain my principles.

Another part of the issue that I lay, at least in part, at the feet of "social networking" is that we have increased the speed with which everyone approaches their life. Cell phones started the problem with allowing everyone to reach anyone at any time (seriously, if homo sapiens have been around for 50,000 years and we went for 49,970 of those years with out having to constantly be in contact with everyone we've ever known, why do I feel like most people now would have an honest-to-goodness panic attack if they didn't have their cell phone for an hour) and being able to post to the web from cell phones made the problem worse. Celebrities and politicians having MySpace pages and Twitter logs only reinforce the idea that everyone needs to have one. Now, why should I spend more than two minutes on the phone when it doesn't take me that long to post a status update on MySpace or a tweet? In that line of thought, when was the last time you received a handwritten letter on actual paper from someone?

These forms of technology and the break-neck pace at which they are emerging and evolving has everyone on the planet so caught up in keeping up that no one seems to realize that they are all completely unnecessary and, in my opinion, are a detriment to society.

I don't think you're wrong in your opinion of people being too busy to put the time necessary into developing genuine friendships and I think that's a damn shame. What keeps me going is the belief that as long as I maintain my principles I will, sooner or later, meet someone who shares them. I wish I could offer better advice (I realize this is more the tip of the iceberg of one of my anti-social networking rants than actual advice) but I would only be able to give you advice if I had solved the problem myself. I haven't and I'm lonely, too.