Maybe because I recently re-read his theory about people's social networks, but I keep on coming back to Dunbar's theory that people only have roughly five really close friends. It made me evaluate who in my life I would consider to be my very best friends, and I've realized that I am extremely #blessed to have more than the average. And while I have a lot more than 150 friends on Facebook (over 1,000), so many of them I don't talk to on a regular basis, and couldn't tell you anything about their current lives. I guess I can trace that back to when Facebook was super popular and the number of friends you had indicated how popular you were. There were people in my high school class that had over 4,000, but they always complained that they would get random messages from guys that creeped them out and who they absolutely did not know. My mom was always pretty protective of what I put online, but even then I still got (and get) random friend requests and messages from weird guys.
All of this makes me extremely thankful for the close number of friends I do have. I like my little social network.
I definitely have over 1,000 Facebook friends too and half of them I don’t even know or I’ve met in passing or something. I get lots of random friend requests too and very rarely do I decline them. I realized the other day though that I really hate scrolling and seeing a whole bunch of people I don’t know posting things I have zero interest in. I’m not on Facebook very much but when I am I get sucked in because I’m reading all these random articles that these random people have shared. And Candy Crush invites are going to be the death of me. I was contemplating deleting a bunch of the people that I don’t talk to but I figured that wasn’t worth it; I’m too lazy. I grateful for my real life friends too. My network with them is stronger, more reliable and much more interesting than Facebook will ever be.
ReplyDeleteI try to keep a certain audience to my social media. I don't need people on Facebook bothering me from like...middle school. I completely agree that our friend circles are still pretty small. I think it depends on the network, but I think some of them are more reasonable to have more followers on for no reason. Such as Instagram. The whole point is to get more likes- therefore you might have a bigger social circle on there. However, on Twitter- if someone does not care what you have to say- they won't even follow you. Great post.
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