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With Friends Like
You, Who Needs Facebook?
by Mad Dog
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The idea of Facebook is to communicate by amassing as many
“friends” as possible, much the way the past decade has been about
amassing debt and houses you can’t afford, and you see where that’s
gotten us. |
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They say you can never
have too many friends, but obviously They aren’t on Facebook.
Facebook, for those of you who have been too busy thinking how much
better this column would be had it been written on an IBM Selectric to
check it out for yourself, is a social networking web site everyone
feels a need to be a part of but no one actually needs to be a part of.
In the evolution of time sucks, it sits right between IM and Twitter, to
the left of Tetris, and across the hall from correcting comma usage in
Wikipedia entries.
The idea of Facebook is to
communicate by amassing as many “friends” as possible, much the way
the past decade has been about amassing debt and houses you can’t
afford, and you see where that’s gotten us. It doesn’t matter
whether they’re your best friend or someone you’ve never heard of
before—the more, the merrier. Hence Facebook’s unofficial motto:
“He who dies with the most friends, wins.”
Once you have these friends, they can
go to your profile page and see what you say to other people, who else
you befriend, what silly quizzes you’ve taken, and what photos you
post. And you can see theirs. It’s exhibitionism—I mean, social
communication—at its best. It lets us expose ourselves to the world
and be Gladys Kravitz at the same time, without ever having to leave the
comfort of our office chair. It’s for reasons like this that we should
all take a moment to thank the Defense Department for creating the
Internet. Well, this and Lolcats.
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While apes can’t read, write, or come up with a reason why
every little girl loves Barbie and the Diamond Castle, they are smart
enough not to go on Facebook and tell the world they’re “having
insects picked off my butt again.”
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But really,
how many friends do you need? Exactly one hundred and forty-eight if you
can believe Robin Dunbar. He’s the anthropologist who came up with
what’s known as the Dunbar Number, which is the maximum number of
people with which we can maintain a stable social relationship. That’s
assuming, of course, that we’d recognize a stable social relationship
if we stumbled upon one. Dunbar came up with this number—often rounded
up to 150—by comparing the brain size and social networks of apes,
then adjusting the figures to compensate for the size of the human
brain. I’m not sure if he scaled it up or down. After all, while apes
can’t read, write, or come up with a reason why every little girl
loves Barbie and the Diamond Castle, they are smart enough not to go on
Facebook and tell the world they’re “having insects picked off my
butt again.” But since Dunbar’s Number is generally accepted by
scientists, I might as well go along with it too.
It turns out that, even if we have
that many friends, we ignore most of them. According to an article in The
Economist (motto: “Don’t blame us for this mess, it’s just our
name”), the in-house sociologist at Facebook says the average man
responds to the postings of only seven of his friends, while women, who
as they like to remind men are more sociable, respond to ten. This means
about 88 percent of our friends are being left in the virtual dust. It
also means that if you have more than 120 friends on Facebook—and what
self-respecting person doesn’t?—you not only aren’t able to
cognitively handle all of them, but even if you magically could you
wouldn’t pay attention to most of them anyway. It makes you feel
downright wanted, doesn’t it?
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Hopefully
in Facebook’s next extreme makeover, which no one will like and will
cause membership in the group “Facebook Needs To Stop Moving My
Cheese” to skyrocket, maybe they’ll put a “Sorry, over the Dunbar
Number limit” button next to the other options |
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This is all the ammunition I need to not add another person as a
friend who claims to have passed me once in the hall in junior high
school, sends a friend request because so-and-so “said you’re a cool
person and I should be your friend,” or is my mother. Hopefully in
Facebook’s next extreme makeover, which no one will like and will
cause membership in the group “Facebook Needs To Stop Moving My
Cheese” to skyrocket, maybe they’ll put a “Sorry, over the Dunbar
Number limit” button next to the other options: “Confirm,”
“Ignore,” and “Leave it on my Request Page forever because I
don’t want them to see anything about me but I also don’t want to
offend them by rejecting them.”
While people say you can ignore a
friend request and the person sending it will never know, I’m not so
sure about that. They also say you can defriend people—a verb that
will make the dictionary as soon as we realize how great it is and start
using it in real life—without their being aware of it. The only
problem is they might start wondering why they never received your
“Accepted as a friend” notification. Or see items popping up on
their home page saying you’ve “gone to the bathroom for the fourth
time today,” have posted a photo of your boss from the office
Christmas party that if you hadn’t made public could have been your
retirement fund, or have tagged them for the tenth time in
“Twenty-five Things You Didn’t Want to Know About Me But I’m Going
to Tell You Anyway.” Then again, they might be too busy searching for
new friends to even notice.
©2009 Mad Dog
Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country.
Read them with your "friends."
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