Can I Count On You?

I read a comment to a recent facebook post that instantly set me thinking and eventually to writing. The contributor commented on friend invitations he receives from people he hasn’t seen in many years or at best are acquaintances. What happens after you accept them, if you in fact do, is the really compelling moment.

What does happen? Almost always, it is silence. No messages or questions or phone number exchanges. Just silence. The contributor wondered aloud, how to understand the idea of the “friend collector”.

We’ve all read about and maybe even participated in the “friend clean-up” exercise on facebook. You scan through all the faces populating your friend list searching for people to eliminate. What are the criteria you use? Here’s a brainstorm list:

• Don’t really know this person
• Never was their friend in the past
• Their posts annoy the hell out of me
• They pissed me off on facebook
• They never communicate with me

I would bet the farm that the last bullet is the least frequent reason someone gets un-friended. I think about my friend list and the amount of time I spend communicating with all those people and the bottom line is that its impossible. No one can effectively communicate or uphold relationships with that many people.

In the past I’ve mentioned Dunbar’s Law to some friends, also known as the Law of 150 that states you cannot maintain strong personal relationships with more than 150 individuals. The number is linked to size of the brain’s neocortex which can limit group size. “the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained." I read about it in Malcolm Gladwell's book "The Tipping Point", one of my all-time favorite reads.

After that number, the strength of the relationship erodes rapidly and what develop are sub-groups or cliques of like individuals. “Like individuals” is openly subjective so there could be all types of connective tissue that bind the sub-groups together like location, career, family, recreation, etc. 

The amusing part of this link is that Dunbar’s theory has roots in the study of primate groups. Primates are highly social and to maintain their connection, their relationships with one another, participate in social grooming. You’ve probably seen clips of apes and chimps picking fleas and assorted fur-dwelling creatures off their peers. This grooming is their social connection and maintains their relationship. It always reminded me of the human dynamic of the barber shop or beauty salon.

Now with facebook and other social media, we socially groom one another with status updates, comments, posting photos, joining the social gaming legion along with a host of other online socially lubricating vehicles. It’s very successful at raising the friend-o-meter. When I played Mafia Wars for a few months I monitored my friend count daily. Then one day my wife asked me why I was now friends with some women who sported bikinis in their profile pictures. I said that they looked awfully good in those swimsuits, so why not?

After the swelling in my face went down, I evaluated the real reason I friended them or accepted their invitation. It was completely artificial. The only value added was to the size of my imaginary Mafia that was duking it out in cyberspace with other artificial mobs and their army of artificial friends.

So, I got out the feather duster and cleaned the seldom used delete key on the keyboard and went to work. So where do I stand today? I don’t do the gaming thing anymore and I’m much more discerning when it comes to friendship acceptance or extending invitations to others. But the question of retention comes back full circle.

Should there be a grace period after you get connected with someone that expires? Imagine a countdown clock for communication. Picture a dashboard clock, counting down the days, hours, minutes and seconds before you and the friend will be disconnected for all time. I love it.

In the end the quality of our relationships with others comes down to our ability to communicate. So a massive friend list with whom you do not communicate with is kind of like staring at the stacks of books in the library. Just because you see them all there and can point to the name on each one doesn’t mean you know or care what’s inside.

Do you care what’s inside? Or are we just counting?