New York:
The British anthropologist and Oxford professor Robin Dunbar has posed a theory that the number of individuals with whom a stable interpersonal relationship can be maintained (read: friends) is limited by the size of the human brain, specifically the neocortex. 'Dunbar's number', as this hypothesis has become known, is 150.
Facebook begs to differ.
What would be an impressive, even exhaustive, number of friends in real life is bush league for Facebook's high rollers, who have thousands. Other social networks use less-intimate terminology to portray contacts (Linked In has "connections," Twitter has "followers"), but Facebook famously co-opted the word " friend" and created a new verb.
Friending "sustains an illusion of closeness in a complex world of continuous partial attention," said Roger Fransecky, a clinical psychologist and executive coach in New York (2,894 friends). "We get captured by Facebook's algorithms. Every day 25 new people can march into your living room. I come from a failed Presbyterian youth, and there was a part of me that first thought it was impolite not to respond. Then I realised I couldn't put them all in a living room - I needed and amphitheater."
Facebook discourages adding strangers as friends, adding that only a tiny fraction of its 400 million users have reached the 5,000 threshold, at which point Facebook wags its digital finger and says: That's enough. The company cites behind- the scenes "back-end technology" as the reason for the cutoff, implying that the system will implode at the sight of a 5,001st friend.
"You hit this limit, and you have to commit Facebook murder, or 'culling' is a better word," said Sreenath Sreenivasan (5,000), dean of student affairs at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. His page bears the admonishment, "FB will not let me add any more friends," and he periodically posts a message asking some to "unfriend" him.
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