This article in the Times interested me. The number of people I count as my friends has exploded in recent years due to e-mail, VOIP (phoning people over the computer), Facebook and instant messaging. I really enjoy being in touch with so many people but sometimes my brain fries from trying to remember everyone's important dates to get cards or presents out on time.
Here's the info:
WE may be able to amass 5,000 friends on Facebook but humans’ brains are capable of managing a maximum of only 150 friendships, a study has found.
Robin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, has conducted research revealing that while social networking sites allow us to maintain more relationships, the number of meaningful friendships is the same as it has been throughout history.
Dunbar developed a theory known as “Dunbar’s number” in the 1990s which claimed that the size of our neocortex — the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language — limits us to managing social circles of around 150 friends, no matter how sociable we are.
These are relationships in which a person knows how each friend relates to every other friend. They are people you care about and contact at least once a year.
Dunbar derived the limit from studying social groupings in a variety of societies — from neolithic villages to modern office environments.
He found that people tended to self-organise in groups of around 150 because social cohesion begins to deteriorate as groups become larger.
Dunbar is now studying social networking websites to see if the “Facebook effect” has stretched the size of social groupings. Preliminary results suggest it has not.
4 comments:
One hundred and FIFTY??? No way could I manage such a cast of characters. There's only so much of me to go around.
Now, here's how I feel about all this internet social networking: if you spread yourself around too much, something's gonna give, and what I'd fear is that the REAL friendships, the true intimate ones fostered over long years, will be relegated to the back seat while all these new connections are being established, developed, explored maintained, whatever.
Nothing wrong with that, and to each her own. I have(wait, let me use my fingers anc count) SEVEN friends---real friends---to whom I could tell 'most anything, to whom I could write long letters, and reasonably expect long thoughtful answers in return.
Now, there are about 75 "acquaintances" in my "contacts" mail list, but they'd not be "friends" in the real sense---we might share jokes, or send a one-liner here and there, but that's not a "friend." It's an "acquaintance."
But that's the way I personally like it---getting closer and closer to longtime friends, "their adoption tried," as Polonius said to Laertes---and not spending overmuch time on the peripherals.
We only have so much time and so much energy. Can't possibly be a real "friend" to 150 people!
I think people don't really relate to Facebook "friends" as real friends anway. The kind of impersonal intimacy it breeds is certainly no substitue for any other form of communication.
Amen, Rachella. Facebook reminds me of this bizarre-o crazy couple here un the USA who have now had 19 children (and of course, a Reality TV Crap Show)---and say they might want MORE! No WAY in the world can two parents, however loving, caring, attentive, and financially secure, give that many kids a decent, thoughtful upbringing. At some point, you reach the point of diminishing returns, and somebody suffers.
That's all I meant about this crazy rush to accumulate five billion "friends" on these sites---it's like a nutty friend of mine who has collected so many Limoges pillboxes that she's run out of room to display them, and has boxes full in drawers. Why have more of ANYTHING than you can reasonably and responsibly enjoy and take care of---be it "friends," trinkets, or offspring?
Interesting question in this modern age!
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