Saturday, January 30, 2010
Too Many Facebook Friends?
I read the article, "Sorry, Facebook friends: Our brains can't keep up" by Don Reisinger. In this article, Reisinger discussed how the number of Facebook friends we have isn't necessarily the same number of relationships that we maintain in real life. Robin Dunbar, a professor of Anthropology at Oxford, says that our brain can only maintain about 150 relationships online and in reality. While his research is still in the process of being completed, I tend to agree with Dunbar, 150 does seem like quite enough. Most of my friends that I have on my Facebook are acquaintances that I don't have any real relationship with. I have a small group of people on Facebook that I talk to often and keep a healthy relationship with, for instance family, friends, and a couple old classmates from high school. On occasion I have seen other people's profiles with more than 500 friends, but I think it's unlikely that they really know all of them. Actually, I'm almost certain some people just get on Facebook and send out friend requests to whoever's page they come across. I've gotten (and ignored) a lot of those types of requests. Who knows why people waste time friending complete strangers? All I know is that sometimes I have enough trouble maintaining what few relationships I already have, anything more than 150 and I would have to call the whole Facebook situation quits.
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