Rethinking the social network

It’s not how many friends you have in your social circles but who you are friends with that matters, argues columnist Tom Chatfield. 

At some point later this year, Facebook will connect one in every seven people on the planet. When it passes the billion user mark – and really it is a question of when, not if – it will inevitably be accompanied by the common lament of the social media critic: social networks degrade the idea of friendship. It’s absurd, they argue, to be “friends” with thousands of people – and an alarming sign of shallow times.

It’s a critique backed by several studies suggesting that it’s only possible to maintain meaningful social relationships with a relatively small number of people. A maximum of around 150 is often cited: a figure is known as “Dunbar’s number” after the evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar, whose work first proposed such a limit.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120411-rethinking-the-social-network