05-06-2016, 06:42 PM
![[Image: facebookfriends-758x426.jpg]](http://www.gamevify.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/facebookfriends-758x426.jpg)
The average Facebook user has about 338 friends. In fact, 15% of the users have a list of 500 friends. This is a huge figure. Others reach the ceiling of 5000.According to Robin Dunbar (an anthropologist from the University of Oxford), one can not effectively communicate with more than 150 people, let alone thousands.
Quote:The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends, but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world,†Dunbar told the London-based Sunday Times. “People obviously like the kudos of having hundreds of friends but the reality is that they’re unlikely to be bigger than anyone else’s.
Facebook is arguably the best place one might turn while thumbing around on a little screen if you use it smartly. The social networking site is useful in tons of ways that go well beyond scrolling through kitten or omelette photos.For Maria Konnikova, writing at the New Yorker, there may be a more significant downside:
Quote:With social media, we can easily keep up with the lives and interests of far more than a hundred and fifty people. But without investing the face-to-face time, we lack deeper connections to them, and the time we invest in superficial relationships comes at the expense of more profound ones. We may widen our network to two, three, or four hundred people that we see as friends, not just acquaintances, but keeping up an actual friendship requires resources. “The amount of social capital you have is pretty fixed,†Dunbar said. “It involves time investment. If you garner connections with more people, you end up distributing your fixed amount of social capital more thinly so the average capital per person is lower.†If we’re busy putting in the effort, however minimal, to “like†and comment and interact with an ever-widening network, we have less time and capacity left for our closer groups.
Facebook is, more than anything, a series of resources to help organize and promote real-world social circles. With these social networking sites we can easily observe the life and interests of many more people, but because of this we are forgetting about the best communications – face to face.
GameVify.com