A perfect circle of friends

WHEN Facebook was founded in 2004, it expanded from a service for students at Harvard to a global phenomenon with one billion users.

But Facebook has not turned the world into a ‘village’, says Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford University and author of How Many Friends Does One Person Need? He will lecture at Listowel Writers’ Week, on May 31, on real and online friendships.

Dunbar says most people have five close friends. “When it comes to the number of people that you can have meaningful relationships with in a social sense, it’s about 150. That includes your family. Outside of that circle, there’s another layer that runs to around 500, which consists of people we think of as acquaintances.”

More social-networking sites will not increase our number of meaningful relationships. “The global village hasn’t happened, because of our constraints. Our brains simply can’t handle the amount of information you would need to know about (large numbers of people) and have real relationships with them. Yes, you can have a nodding acquaintance with more than 500 people. And there’s another layer, which runs to 1,500, and is defined as the number of people whose faces you can put a name to. You’d know very little about them, but you would notice them on the street. However, they probably wouldn’t know you.”

Poor information-processing limits our ability to know many people intensely, as does lack of time. “To build and service friendships, you need to invest a lot of time in them. To maintain five close friendships costs 60% of our social time and effort. This includes spending time with our close friends, or just chatting to them on the phone,” Dunbar says.

Online social networking is practised more by girls than by boys, says Dunbar, but the bulk of people who have between 200 and 1,000 Facebook friends are male. “That’s because boys don’t understand what a relationship is quite as well as girls. Boys’ relationships are less emotionally intense than those of girls.”

While girls know the value of talking, to ‘service’ close friendships, boys have to “do stuff together, such as playing football or drinking together in bars.”

“Digital technology is well-pitched for the way in which women’s social world works. It gives them the opportunity to talk at great length, either on Facebook or on the phone. The digital forms of communication are kind of purposeless from the male point of view. Boys’ phone calls are notoriously short compared to those of girls. Lots of boys will have Facebook pages, but you often hear them say they rarely bother to check it, whereas girls are constantly checking and updating,” he says.

The majority of people on Facebook have between 100 and 250 friends. Professional users have up to 5,000 friends. “They could be journalists using Facebook as a source of information, or they might be aspiring poets or band members, using Facebook as a cheap fan club. They could also include politicians, using the site to spread their message,” Dunbar says.

Over the years, friendships ebb and flow. The number of a person’s friends stabilises when he/she is aged 20. “There is quite a high turnover of friends up until then. You get to a point, later in life, where you start to lose the different layers of friends, one by one. When you’re still young, you simply refill those slots with somebody else. You don’t have the energy, or the incentive, to start replacing people as you get older. Once you get to 70ish, when friends start to die off, the slots become vacant. You don’t have opportunities to make new friends. You can’t really go clubbing and you wouldn’t be bothered, anyway. So your world starts to shrink.”

Dunbar says that a romantic relationship is “particularly expensive to maintain.” By ‘expensive,’ he means the amount of time required to nurture it. It has attrition. “Your inner core of friends averages about four, because you’ll sacrifice a friend or a family member when you have a romantic relationship,” he says.

Assiduous users of Facebook keep their friends up to date on their status, be it single or attached. It’s like a statement of availability, or otherwise. “People have always done this, using different sorts of symbols, such as wedding rings. If you look at the tradition of European hair styles, going back to the 19th century, you’ll note that women wore their hair long when they were young and unattached. As soon as they got married, they tied their hair up. Different cultures have their own way of indicating that someone is spoken for,” Dunbar says.

Facebook is a great way of keeping in touch with friends, but it’s limited. “The problem with Facebook, and all the other text-based media, is that it’s too slow and clunky when it comes to sharing jokes, for example. A joke has to be very, very funny to work on Facebook.”

Despite its shortcomings, Dunbar says Facebook is so successful “because we are living in a mobile age. People are constantly moving away from home, for jobs and university and opportunities. Facebook is a way of maintaining your old friendships. But it’s inevitable that some friendships will decay if you don’t actually see people. All Facebook is doing is slowing down the rate of decay.

“You’re never going to prevent it from happening. It may take longer for the relationship to fall off the edge, but it’s going to happen if you don’t, at some point, actually meet up. Lots of things are important (in face-to-face relationships.) There’s subtle touching, not in intimate, romantic relationships, but between people in close friendships. It’s something we don’t even think about.”

Being able to see the whites of your friends’ eyes is important, as is experiencing laughter. “Laughter makes the world go round,” says Dunbar and the overly used abbreviation, ‘lol’, is, he says, no substitute for a good old-fashioned belly laugh.

* Listowel Writers’ Week is from May 29-June 2. www.writersweek.ie