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TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING
Everyone agrees that having friends is a good thing but can you have too many friends? There is a lot of debate on the use of the word “friend” in online circles. What constitutes a friend? How can anyone have 10,000 friends? What are the limits of our online relationships?
British anthropologist Robin Dunbar once proposed that there is an upper limit of 150 to the number of people with which each of us can sustain a meaningful social relationship. This has come to be known as the Dunbar number and is often bandied around in debates about online relationships as if it were an incontrovertible truth that those spending too much time with too many people were losers with no “real” friends.
Now this rather depends on two things – what we mean by the word “know” and the ways in which we maintain the connection. I reckon that, in the past, Dunbar was probably right and the maximum number of people I could sustain any sort of relationship with would be 150 – but online it is different. I know thousands of people online and I am often surprised at the depth of that knowledge. As an example, I keep a contact database of people that I know, both online and offline, on my computer. While going through the lists I am often struck by the number of people who, when I see their name, I can recall in terms of what they look like, where I met them, and what our relationship is. I reckon it is more than a thousand people that I am pretty familiar with and can remember ...
