When Charles Dicken’s Scrooge bursts into song at the end of A Muppet’s Christmas Carol, with “If you want to know the measure of a man, simply count his friends,” should he have specified what type of friend he meant?
Judging by the average number of ‘friends’ that people in Malta have on Facebook, we’re an amicable bunch. Based on an entirely unscientific study in which I compared my Maltese friends (on FB) and my UK ones, people in Malta are more than ten times friendlier than the British with an average of 4400 friends versus 421. And then, because I only have 314, I felt unpopular, sadly uninteresting and wholly diminished as an individual. [Actually, that’s artistic licence for effect. Please don’t inundate me with ‘pity’ friend requests.]
But that’s what social media does – deliberately designed to be engaging, it rewires users’ brains like crack cocaine (although the compulsion is less intense). Every time we receive a new friend request or notification, comment or follow, it triggers a release of the reward-and-pleasure neurotransmitter dopamine that keep us checking back in for more. And when we don’t see those hearts and thumbs up on our latest post, we feel spurned.
If you are old enough to remember life before social media, spare a thought for Gen Z, the first generation to have grown up with social media as an integral part of their life experience rather than as an add-on. A survey released in the UK two weeks ago shows that more than 60% of this cohort agreed social media has done them more harm than good. Their teenage lives were lived in continual comparison to thousands of others, including heavily-edited influencers. Their bedroom was never a sanctuary: trolling and toxicity followed them right under the duvet.
“We worried constantly about being left out, or left behind, or saying the wrong thing and somebody screenshotting the evidence faster than we could delete it,” says Gen Z commentator Ceci Browning in The Times (London). “There was a sinister sense that the phones we were carrying around in our pockets could be used as weapons too.”
Over the last six months news stories suggest that Gen Z are trying to reduce their dependence on their screens; and millennial journalist Alex Hurst wrote on the benefits of ditching his smart phone in the Guardian just last week. But will he lose friends because of it? And is this a worry when, in a world where loneliness is an increasing concern, there’s compelling evidence that the more friends we have, the less likely we are to succumb to disease, and the better able we are to recover from disaster?
And, if no one can humanly transform 4400 virtual friends into real life ones, how many should they be aiming for?
Professor Robin Dunbar, a world-leading anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist and author of Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships has the answer. ‘Dunbar’s number’ is the suggested limit to our brain’s capacity for (real) friends, the number of relationships we can maintain where we really know who a person is and what’s important to them.
“We have to devote time to cultivating true friends [and in ‘true friends’, I’m including both the family members and friends we choose to spend time with], and establishing a network of reliable companions upon whom we can depend in times of trouble,” Dunbar told me. “You can’t wait until you need them to make friends: it takes a long time to grow an old friend.”
“There are also biological limitations to the number of meaningful relationships that an individual can maintain.”
Because real friendship is not computationally easy, extrapolating from an analysis of social group and brain sizes in monkeys, apes and humans, Dunbar estimated that a person can comfortably maintain only 150 stable relationships with real friends – from besties to peripheral acquaintances. Interestingly, he says, the natural group size of human communities historically and of modern-day subdivisions of companies into efficient groups, generally hovers around 150 too.
And so, perhaps for the measure of a woman or a man, we should take friends out of the equation all together and turn to Martin Luther King, Jr who said “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
As the challenges and controversies of the world now reach us via social media as often as through mediated news channels, perhaps one way to get the measure of each and every one of us is through the choices we make on-line, via likes and comments and through what we choose to share. Each of these actions, via social media algorithms, influences, in a small way, on the future of our world.
Just as a real-life smile has a ripple effect on the people around you, whether you know them or not, so an upbeat attitude on-line can breed further positivity. And that’s surely more important than another friend you don’t know?