| "Friends must have eaten salt together" |
[Mar. 23rd, 2009|02:06 pm] |
An interesting article from the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7920434.stm
It has some interesting comments about numbers and qualities of friends. I'm mostly posting it to stir up trouble though I suppose it's less likely to do so on LJ than on Facebook or something like that.
"The average number is about 150, says leading anthropologist Robin Dunbar. "
<snip>
"They usually consist of an inner circle of five "core" people and an additional layer of 10, he says. That makes 15 people - some will probably be family members - who are your central group and then outside that, there's another 35 in the next circle and another 100 on the outside. And that's one person's social world."
or another choice quote:
" There's a limit to how many close friends like this you can have and it's probably between six and 12, he says. "I think this idea that you can have virtually limitless numbers of friends does water down the concept of friendship. I think it's one of those things where less is more." "
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| Comments: |
This totally makes sense to me.
Why would this stir up trouble?
my thought was that people who truly believe in social media would be upset by the notion that they don't have 1000+ friends or that the many people that you(generic) only interact via facebook/livejournal/twitter aren't real friends.
Eh. I do think that some people that I interact with on LJ and not in real life really are my friends. (Not everyone, clearly. But there are a few that I feel I've really gotten to know through the medium, and that's a valid friendship to me.) But I'm not upset by the idea that people in general might disagree; I'd only be upset if I thought I was close to someone and they didn't think so.
I think people identify "close" as being different things, as well, which is what makes this kind of discussion ripe for mis-understanding.
I don't really think that these concepts can be clearly lined up (or out) because each person feels them differently. Its like the pain scale - a 2 to me might be a 5 to you, or swapped.
I think (as ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) syrensix and I have discussed) that we need more specific words to describe non-biological relationships with one another. I can tell you that someone is my sibling or my second cousin twice removed, and you'll get the context of the relationships. I can't do the same thing with "friend." If we had better language and concepts surrounding friendship, I don't think this argument would cause any fuss; you can have 150 third cousins and no one would bat an eye. And no one would question what the optimum number of them are.
Yes, i'm down with that. I have a lot of aquantinces that get called friends here, because its rude to call them acquanitances. I've made few freinds in this country, of varying levels, but i'm in touch with all of them.
The internet helps with that, a whole lot.
I need some coffee and motion before i can spell/type. | |
