(this post draws extensively from the February 28 Economist article linked above. read it. it's great.)Well actually, that's not true. As of today, March 10, 2009, I have 340 friends. Pretty sweet, huh? :)
But according to this Oxford professor named Robin Dunbar, a person cannot sustain a network of more than 148 friends and
acquaintances. Apparently, it's just too stressful. Dunbar compares the human network dilemma to the primate network dilemma: "keeping track of who to groom--and why--demands quite a bit of mental computation. You need to remember who is allied with, hostile to, or lusts after whom, and act accordingly."
Right...
But
Facebook is different, isn't it? Adding a new friend doesn't cost me money and doesn't cause me stress; in fact, adding a new friend can make me happy because I have reconnected with someone that I knew (or kind of knew) in the past and I have increased the size of my friend network, and thereby my bragging rights.
The Economist counters that most of my
Facebook friends are not really friends, and in truth,
Facebook friends are not even part of my network. (The Economist only considers a person to be in my network if I am interacting with that person...as opposed to anonymously perusing their profile. Some people call this stalking) Apparently,
Facebook tracks how much we poke, comment, message, and
IM one another. Here are the average number of contacts broken out by gender and number of friends:
- a guy with about 120 friends comments on about 7 of his friends' walls and chats or messages with about 4 of his friends. with 500 friends he comments on 17 walls and messages/chats with 10.
- a girl with about 120 friends comments on about 10 of her friends' walls and chats or messages with about 6 of her friends. with 500 friends she comments on 26 walls and messages/chats with 16.
A few comments on the data:
1. We interact with a very small proportion of our
Facebook friends. But somehow I still want to increase my number of friends. Why is that? Maybe
Facebook friends have more in common with baseball cards than real friends. When I was 8, I couldn't buy enough baseball cards--I would go to the store every weekend and tear into a pack or two with my allowance. The players on the cards mattered for a few minutes, but by the next weekend I had forgotten about the old cards and wanted to get new ones.
Now, I love
Facebook but would like to suggest that many of our
Facebook friends are actually just contacts or acquaintances--not friends. (Well now I feel like Mr. Obvious)
2. Women/girls/gals have more vibrant social networking lives than men/boys/guys. I think that's great. That's part of why I like women: they really enjoy socializing and building relationships--even online relationships. I have heard that guys, alternatively, join social networking sites to accomplish specific goals or to complete certain tasks. Most common goals/tasks for guys: flirting, making business contacts, planning events, meeting social needs. I read an article a few months ago that said married men are by far the least likely demographic to have a
Facebook page--and I conjecture that their disinterest in social networking stems from their disinterest in flirting. What do you think?
3. I don't get stressed out by adding new
Facebook friends, but Dunbar's theory about a limit on the number of human intimate relationships fits my experience and fits the data. We may have quivers full of
Facebook friends, but still we are close with only a few.
I like that. Even as Blackberry, Twitter, and
Facebook have made relationships easier to maintain, our real capacity for relationship and our need for intimacy has not changed. We still search for a few intimate friends and family members with whom to share our lives.
And it follows that our capacity and need for spiritual intimacy has not changed. God is still there and still relevant whether I have 50
Facebook friends or 500.
