A quarter of a century ago, before Facebook, back in the day when you had to be indoors to phone somebody, we had an average of three friends each. The study — by Time Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS for short) defined friends as close confidantes, people to whom you can tell anything. And now, when we’re Facebooked and Twittered up to our eyebrows, when we feel as if we have spent 40 days and nights in the desert after a half hour on the underground, how many friends do we have? Two. Not 857, after all.
This isn’t the first time an academic has poured cold water on the emotional possibilities of the Facebook phenomenon. Professor Robin Dunbar, in the early 1990s, proposed Dunbar’s number, the theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain social relationships. He defined these as relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person, though if you applied that to my boyfriend, it would drop to about 15 and I’m worried about whether or not my sister would be in it.
I prefer the TESS definition, or better still, the Portuguese saying: “You have five friends, and the rest is landscape.”
I was reading an interview with a young person recently, in which he said that he had realized that a friend is someone who will drop what they are doing and come and help you, if you need it.
I thought it was weird that a person whose formative years occurred post-Internet needs to have that spelled out, but it also struck me that you can only perform that office for a handful of people, and you would ideally (unless you’re some kind of grifter) want a balance, between the people who you will drop everything for, and those who will drop everything for you.
So I have five friends. For my own amusement, I shuffle them up and down the top-five hierarchy, and sometimes kick one out for a new friend, only to have to put them back in when I remember that you can’t make old friends. A couple of couples I bust in on a technicality, by thinking of them as one person. But still, five friends. The rest is landscape.
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