ยป You Have Too Many Friends
The most common complaint about Facebook made by people who have never been on Facebook is that it takes too much time. After joining, they quickly realize that their friends are not actually generating that much interesting activity (the days of death by 1000 SuperWall pokes are long over). Most of what your friends do is just broadcasting and interactions are generally small and quick. It’s not for nothing that anthropologists call these social interactions “grooming”.
The most common complaint about Facebook made by people who have suspended their accounts is that it doesn’t significantly contribute to their social life. These people fail to understand that the little actions of monitoring their friends’ broadcasts (done before social networking with gossip) and engaging in grooming add up to social cohesion. But what about all the broadcasts you don’t care about in the least and all the friends you never interact with? The problem, in my opinion, is that you aren’t friends with the right people on Facebook.
If you’re a promoter or political organizer or something like that, then your professional Facebook profile should collect as many friends as possible. If you’re a regular citizen, then I think the proper use of Facebook is to do high-quality grooming of a smaller number of people. I propose setting a fixed number of friends and unfriending someone every time you go over that number. This has to be a fuzzy process for a few reasons:
- not everyone you socially interact with is currently on Facebook (eg: your boss, your grandmother)
- after you lose touch with people you hang on to them for awhile online to reduce friction in restarting the relationship
- when you first meet someone you friend them as part of the process of building a social relationship, a process that might fail
I’m going to use Dunbar’s Number: 150. There are many reasons why this number is arbitrary, but there’s some precedent and it is a good symbol. I hit 151 friends today and unfriended someone I met only once many months ago. If you’re with me, join this group.
Okay. you convinced me. I was just hiding people I didn’t want to see.
karen
26 Mar 09 at 5:35 pm
I have fewer than 150 friends on Facebook. Being socially awkward and/or coldly uninterested in most other people’s lives seems to be the easiest way to achieve your goal.
Don
27 Mar 09 at 7:48 am
Totally agreed. My criteria for deleting people from facebook is either I have only met them a handful of times and it went nowhere (the failed friendship attempt), or I don’t intend to ever see them again (whether or not I like them doesn’t weigh in in this case). And I just don’t add people from my distant past at all.
That said, I deleted my facebook awhile ago because, even with just my actual friends,it really was taking up too much of my time. I’ve always been an advocate of it, and I do see the value of social networking sites, but because you can do literally everything on facebook your social life can become slave to it. I think it centralizes people’s interactions too much – which is what I liked about it initially, but I grew to feel almost terrorized by it. I found it a relief that I didn’t immediately become a social pariah once I wasn’t on facebook.
tara
27 Mar 09 at 9:14 am
I just went through and dropped 25 people. My initial criteria was “if I saw this person on the street, would I stop to talk to them”. In some cases, I doubt I would have even recognized them.
So I think that leaves me with ~175 “friends”. I tried to keep at least one connection to each arm of my previous life (one elementary school friend, one first year residence friend, etc). Might have to give those up.
Ryley
27 Mar 09 at 12:55 pm
Interesting — right after my email..! you know, maybe it is grooming, but are we apes or people?
I think it has more to do with the inability of facebook/social networking to make new friends — real social networks in real life enable you to make chance encounters with individuals who you may be able to make real friends with because they are interesting and or cool.
For the average user of facebook, unless you spend a lot of time on a fancy profile/self-marketing, it does not have the ability to quickly and intuitively communicate discover if you’ll like someone, which is how people function in real life.
For public figures, certainly social networking sites are good, but then FB becomes nothing more than one more element in a well-planned advertising campaign. For ordinary people this is different. In the same way that people distrust the cheesy smiles of realtors on the side of buses, I suspect many people find well-executed profles disturbing.
Many people find business networking or a party full of strangers awkard; facebook takes this experience to a whole new level.
Stewart
29 Mar 09 at 3:11 pm
False dichotomy: The great apes form a taxonomic family, including four extant genera: humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans.
Don
30 Mar 09 at 8:44 am
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