It has been 24 hours since I’ve deactivated my Facebook account. My morning started off as any other morning. I hardly ever check my account as soon as I wake up, so nothing was out of the ordinary. However, once I got to work for my seven hour shift at the library (primarily a desk job), I realized I couldn’t do my usual routine of checking my email and Facebook. I soon felt as though the day was going to be very long and isolated. Even though I spend more time on Facebook when I’m out work since I’m already on the computer, I don’t necessarily do anything extra. I just kind of keep up with my news feed and what is going on throughout the day. Without this distraction, I realized work might be a lot longer. After getting over the initial feeling of antsiness (is that a word?), I started to forget about the fact that I wasn’t on Facebook. I got more done at work and was able to fill the time I would have spent on Facebook doing homework and reading the news. I realized that I might not have access to see what my “friends” were doing on Facebook, but did I really care? Why fill my head with their personal details when I can’t even keep my own straight?
I began thinking about this concept of “friends” on Facebook. I have some friends who have close to 1000 friends while others have less than 100. One of my closest friends, Megan has 695 “friends” while my other close friend, Meg, has only 88. Meg’s friend list seems more reasonable than Megan’s list, which prompted me to talk to both of them. I asked them both the same question. How many of your Facebook friends do you actually talk to. Meg said she talks to about 20 of them regularly. The rest, she said, she talks to occasionally or for certain reasons. For example, she is friends with relatives but doesn’t talk to them all that often or even on Facebook. So, again, she talks to 20 people regularly. This really got me thinking about the 695 “friends” Megan had on her list. I asked her if she talked to or even knew all of her “friends.” She said that she had at least met everyone once in her life, but only talked to a very small number of people on her “friends” list. I asked her what was the point of keeping all of these people as friends if she doesn’t talk to any of them. Her response was that she felt bad deleting people once they were Facebook friends. She elaborated and told me that she doesn’t really look at a lot of people’s profiles, especially the ones she has only met once or twice in her life. Out of 695 friends, she said she mostly talks to the same few people and looks at the same profiles.
This seems consistent with the idea of Dunbar’s number which was created by anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, and says that your brain has a cognitive limit on the number of friends you can have. That number is 150. Dunbar said you can have over 1,000 friends on Facebook, but internet traffic indicates that person goes to the same, limited profiles over and over again. This article, http://mashable.com/2010/01/25/brain-facebook-friends/, goes into more detail about Dunbar’s number and how people only have the ability of maintaining a certain number of friendships.
As someone who recently deleted about 300 friends from Facebook, I can say that I feel much better. I don’t miss the personal details from people I don’t care about on my newsfeed and I feel like my Facebook, in a way, has become more exclusive to me again.
I began thinking about this concept of “friends” on Facebook. I have some friends who have close to 1000 friends while others have less than 100. One of my closest friends, Megan has 695 “friends” while my other close friend, Meg, has only 88. Meg’s friend list seems more reasonable than Megan’s list, which prompted me to talk to both of them. I asked them both the same question. How many of your Facebook friends do you actually talk to. Meg said she talks to about 20 of them regularly. The rest, she said, she talks to occasionally or for certain reasons. For example, she is friends with relatives but doesn’t talk to them all that often or even on Facebook. So, again, she talks to 20 people regularly. This really got me thinking about the 695 “friends” Megan had on her list. I asked her if she talked to or even knew all of her “friends.” She said that she had at least met everyone once in her life, but only talked to a very small number of people on her “friends” list. I asked her what was the point of keeping all of these people as friends if she doesn’t talk to any of them. Her response was that she felt bad deleting people once they were Facebook friends. She elaborated and told me that she doesn’t really look at a lot of people’s profiles, especially the ones she has only met once or twice in her life. Out of 695 friends, she said she mostly talks to the same few people and looks at the same profiles.
This seems consistent with the idea of Dunbar’s number which was created by anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, and says that your brain has a cognitive limit on the number of friends you can have. That number is 150. Dunbar said you can have over 1,000 friends on Facebook, but internet traffic indicates that person goes to the same, limited profiles over and over again. This article, http://mashable.com/2010/01/25/brain-facebook-friends/, goes into more detail about Dunbar’s number and how people only have the ability of maintaining a certain number of friendships.
As someone who recently deleted about 300 friends from Facebook, I can say that I feel much better. I don’t miss the personal details from people I don’t care about on my newsfeed and I feel like my Facebook, in a way, has become more exclusive to me again.
No comments:
Post a Comment