Friends Day and Real Friends: How Many of Us?

Twelve years and one day ago, humankind changed forever with the founding of Facebook. While at first that sounds like a blasphemous statement, first consider the impact that this website has had on our lives. As of January 2016, Facebook has 1.59 billion active users and those users spend an average of 20.1 minutes on the site every day which equates to about 122 hours spent on Facebook a year. To put that in perspective, that means the average user spends just over 5 days a year on Facebook, or if you multiply that out over the average expected lifespan of 78.6 years, the average user will spend 1.1 years of your life on Facebook. Facebook has had an unbelievable impact on the daily lives of over 1.59 billion people (approximately 20% of the world’s population), and to commemorate that impact on its twelfth birthday yesterday, Facebook allowed users to share cute, albeit cookie-cutter videos of their friends for the world to see using #friendsday. Friends day led to a lot of outpouring of love on social media, and great media coverage making it an unequivocal success. Facebook will certainly keep coming up with more elaborate ways to celebrate this day in the future, and perhaps it might even become a holiday. Before we get to that point though, this Friends Day allows us time to reflect on the impact of Facebook on how we define “friend.”

Before the advent of Facebook (and other social media sites), friends and friendship was fairly easy to define. It was the people you went to school with, hung out with in your free time, worked with, and went to church with. If you saw that person a lot, chances are they were your friend. If they moved away, chances were that, contrary to lip service about staying in touch, that friendship slowly faded with the occasional thought of “Oh! I need to call that person and see how they are.” Thanks (or no thanks depending on your views) to Facebook, that definition of friendship has become antiquated. Renowned anthropologist Robin Dunbar notes that, “What Facebook does and why it’s been so successful in so many ways is it allows you to keep track of people who would otherwise effectively disappear.” That, more than anything else, is Facebook’s greatest strength. It allows you to keep up with your best friend in high school that is soul searching in the Sahara. It allows you to keep up with your childhood best friend that switched schools. (Unfortunately) it allows you to keep up with your exes. Facebook has shifted friendship from face-to-face interactions to pictures, likes, and Buzzfeed articles. With that, friendship has changed from shared experiences together to heavily edited photos that only show you in the best possible light. Facebook has given us unprecedented connectivity, but at what cost?

According to research by Dunbar, humans can only maintain 100 to 200 stable social relationships with 150 being the number for the average person. These are the people that you would invite to a large party. You know them, you like them, and you don’t mind chatting with them for ten to fifteen minutes; but that’s about it as far are your interaction with them. From there, the next important number is 50. These are the people that you would consider your close friends, and you’d have them over for a group dinner or a smaller party. These are the people that you see often, but at the end of the day they’re not your best friends. From there, the next number is 15, and these are the people that you turn to for advice and help, but at the end of the day Dunbar says that you can only have 5 relationships that make up your close support group (or in the words of the great philosopher Kanye West, your “Real Friends”). Five (There’s your answer Kanye so please stop asking “How many of us?”). Think about that for a second. That’s the number of people that you can truly have intimate, deep relationships with according to a mountain of scientific research. According to Facebook, the average user has 338.8 friends on Facebook, well outside of the Dunbar’s range. While it certainly is possible to read and keep up with your 338.8 friends, it’s impossible to be able to develop meaningful relationships with those people. Going back to Dunbar’s research, we spend 60 percent of our social capital on that core group of 50 people and then the other 40 percent on the other 100 people. With Facebook, we now have to try and spread that social capital even thinner to be able to hit each and every one of our 338.8 friends. That connectivity has come with the price of depth. Friendships used to be something that you put a great deal of effort into building. There were good times, there were bad times, and then there was everything in between. When things got rough, you had to sit down with that person and work it out because you had invested so much time and energy into that relationship. With Facebook becoming friends with someone is as easy as clicking a button. There’s no commitment attached. If things work out? Great! If not, forgetting that person forever is as simple as clicking the unfriend button. Facebook has taken away the one item that manufactured great friendships, compromise. As Dunbar states, “In the sandpit of life, when somebody kicks sand in your face, you can’t get out of the sandpit. You have to deal with it, learn, compromise. On the internet, you can pull the plug and walk away. There’s no forcing mechanism that makes us have to learn.” Facebook has changed the way we invest in our relationships for better or for worse.

This brings us to an interesting point. Facebook knows all about this research. It knows that you can’t possibly keep up with all of the people that you’re “friends” with on the site. It knows that realistically your group of close friends can only be around 50 people, and if you look at your NewsFeed, you’ll notice that for the most part the same set of people keep showing up on it. Slowly but surely, “friends” updates that you don’t interact with or (more terrifyingly) that Facebook deems isn’t important to you will start to disappear. Thanks to new algorithms, Faceboook culls your friends for you into a small group that you should care about. In essence, Facebook chooses your “Real Friends” for you. Depending on who’s posts you interact with most or who’s profile you look at most, Facebook determines your close group of 50 for you without you even realizing. When you think about your best friend from high school and wonder why he/she stopped using Facebook, check out that person’s page sometime. You’ll quickly realize that he didn’t stop using the service, but Facebook decided he/she wasn’t important to you enough anymore and removed his updates from your NewsFeed. In ancient, we had matchmakers to determine who should get married. Now in today’s age, we have friendmakers… rather a singular friendmaker who decides who you’re friends with and who you’re not, Facebook. By picking and choosing who’s updates you see on your NewsFeed, Facebook determines who you see and think about in your life. As the old saying goes, out of sight, out of mind. Without seeing updates from those people from your past, they’ll slowly fade from your memory just like in the days before Facebook when they moved away and you never heard from them again. In essence, Facebook’s algorithms have undone its greatest strength, keeping up with people from your past. Even worse, these algorithms are now deciding which of your friends to care about, and which of your friends to toss to the side. While at the end of the day it’s obviously up to the individual to maintain their own relationships, Facebook now has a substantial influence on those relationships by determining who you think about thanks to the way its NewsFeed is run. Think about this the next time you watch a Friends Day video and wonder why you’re not one of the people featured on it. When Kanye asks you, “Who you real friends?” don’t even bothering answering because the only person that knows is Facebook.

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