Blog Post #3



   While looking further into the ideas presented in the Dunbar video today, I came across an interesting article titled “I have 1605 Facebook friends. Why do I feel so alone?" It discusses the issue of loneliness in connection to social media during a time where individuals have instant access to hundreds of "friends" and followers on Facebook, in which they could theoretically talk to. For example, we can see in this article that one user feels lonely despite having over 1600 "friends" on Facebook in which she could reach out to.  In examining Dunbar’s conclusions from the "why the internet won't get you anymore friends" video, we can see why this loniness is a reality for many of us.

   Dunbar mentions that our social world is made up of multiple social circles of various sizes including circles of 5, 15,50  and 150 people, with the quality of our inner most circle of 5 being the most intense and150 being the cognitive limit of the number of people that we can keep in our social group. With the pressure of having enough "friends"/ followers and the desire to form more connections/ possible friends, social media may be causing us to believe we can stretch that limit of who is considered part of our social group. With hundreds of friends and followers on social media (surpassing the Dunbar number) we can see how an individual may be negatively impacted if say, they only had 20 out of their supposed 1000 friends comment on their photo. This may lead them to believe that only 20 out of their 1000 friends care about them enough to connect with them. This expectation of all of our social media followers to interact with us as friends may be linked to the idea that they fit into our social group causing an individual to feel lacking or lonely when they don’t meet their expectation. Dunbar also mentions that if we are not investing time into our relationship’s they will decay and with the inability of a user to keep up personally with hundreds of social media friends, it may leave them feeling hopeless in their lack of connection with their friends.

Comments

  1. UnknownOctober 20, 2018 at 10:13 AM

    I really enjoyed reading your post Maddy! You also provided a great example in relation to the Dunbar video: if only 20 out of 1000 friends "liked" a picture, it'll negatively impact the person's self-esteem. Our social media lives are like add-ons to our reality. The personas/pictures we post are part of our individual brands and when we don't meet the expected engagement, it's easy to become personally offended. These numbers are also surface level because it only measures quantity, not quality. It's interesting to contrast the 1000s of friends people have on Facebook, but on average, people only have 3-5 close relationships.

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