Friendships at a click

Have we really become friendlier with technology? If you have about 1,000 names in your mobile phonebook or your Facebook account, how many of those can you really call your “friend”? If you were to listen to Robin Durban, evolutionary anthropologist at Oxford, he will tell you that you could name about 150 friends. It is called Durban’s number and it was also popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller, “The Tipping Point.”

I listened to him being interviewed by Alok Jha in The Guardian podcast last March 7 and he was introduced as one who specializes in the Evolution of Sociality. In other words, he examines the natural history of relationships and one of them is friendship. Being natural history, he also considers the sociality of other primates with whom we share our ancestry. He also studied other animals and the groups they have maintained. He also has a book entitled “How Many Friends Does One Person Need?” which expounds on this theoretical number.

Dunbar says we evolved to need friends because we need all the help we can get to survive the threats from our environment. He thinks that our brain is the size that it is now — relatively big — because of the sociability that we needed to cultivate in order to survive. He said that the size of our necortex — that brain part known to be involved in conscious thought, language — corresponds with how many “friends” we can really hold.

We are now past our cave days and friendship is now more than a literal rope to hold on to when you are about to fall. The friends you have are your friends not just because they saved you from droughts or storms or from some hungry beast. We have friends now because they help us survive this story we find ourselves in called life, literally and poetically. The “150,” Dunbar says, is the average (females are on the higher end). He says this is the number with whom we can maintain stable constant relationships and beyond that is voyeurism. These relationships mean that you know who each person is and how each is related to persons in your circle. Those 150 friends are, of course, not valued the same way. He mentioned the “normal” number for the closest ones is about three to five. Then, the other friends occupy layers like concentric circles, rippling out of the center.

In these friendships, he says “gossip” serves as some sort of currency that is not as trivial as we think. He thinks that gossip is what grooming is to primates. He apparently examined the grooming that apes do to one another and thinks it is more than they need to keep their hair from bugs. He thinks that gossip is a “key to maintaining social coherence.” Hmm, I wonder what he thinks of the dark side of gossip and how it can also perpetuate lies as well as break social groups instead of uniting them.

When I was reading some of the comments from the podcast, I read one which said that he developed an application which detects if you have not been in touch with this or that friend in your social networking page and removes that friend. I think it is quite disconcerting that we now need software to figure out which ones are our friends and which ones have fallen by the sidewalk of our life histories. Dunbar was right when he was asked if indeed we are getting friendlier with technology. He carefully phrased it to say that indeed, we can change the number of the people we can call “friends” but it is still our brains that determine how many we can really keep and grow with. And he thinks it is 150.

I was told by a foreigner that when he looks at the Facebook page of his Filipino friends, they range between 700 and 2,000 while those of his other friends register between 300 and 500. Could this be telling us something about what has become of the Filipino’s definition of friendship? Maybe it does. Or maybe, as your Facebook page says, it’s complicated.

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