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It's a kind of consensus that this magic number of 150 is the maximum collection of people that you can really be closely connected to. The BBC series A History of the World in 100 Objects alluded to it, noting how entire political and economic systems, including the need for money, ultimately stem from this number. Malcolm Gladwell refers to it in Outliers. It's seen as a constant despite advances in technology. It is, it's claimed, "hard-wired".
Personally I'm not so sure. I mean, filofaxes and rolodexes and Outlook's Calendar can do a lot of work for you. Maybe you spread youself a little bit more thinly, and I suspect that the number of people you can "efficiently" be real friends with might be a bit higher than it was when Croesus came up with the idea of coinage (yes, I know it was invented separately in other parts of the world at about the same time) as the new brilliant idea of the day, which meant that it didn't matter if the guy you were dealing with was a complete stranger. Maybe the number is up to, what? 200? Perhaps more, 300? Well, now I think we are stretching it.
So what of the people who collect many more than 150 friends? Thankfully we can measure this now -- Facebook is a great anthropological tool.
Initially the collection of as many friends as possible was reportedly a girlie school thing. Popularity is far more important than intelligence in the world; I know this now and I wish that I had known it then. In the cooperative-rather-than-overtly competitive land of schoolgirldom, the more friends you had, the "better" you were.
Then there's the flippertygibbit, the person who meets thousands of people and just facebooks the lot of them, without really thinking much about it.
But then there's the "networker", and I was reminded of this, darker, side of Facebook by a piece in today's Sunday Times magazine.
Actually, the thought had been triggered by an idle remark that Dom Sutton made in the pub. He said that "let's face it, Facebook is really about social marketing". Well, this actually hadn't occurred to me. I thought that the stuff that Neil Channing was coming out with was, basically, spam, a bastardization of what Facebook was "about". But then I thought about it. No, maybe Dom was right. After all, it's free, it has an audience. It's not so much a blog as a place for companies and people to push their wares.
The ST article this morning cites a complete cunt called Keith Ferrazi, a man who is such a lowlife shit that I might even have to go out there to buy his book. This man has spotted that your social circle has a value. The bigger your social circle, the more that you can introduce A to B, because A has what B needs, but A does not know B, then the more both A and B will be in your non-monetary debt. Your friends are, in other words, a resource. But eventually the tail wags the dog. You start accumulating friends because they are a resource, not because they are friends (remember the magic number of 150!). That's why these accumulators have rolodexes, because there is no way they can keep all of the information in their heads. But they need that information (birthday, name of kids, etc), because, if they were the freidsn that the networker is claiming them to be, he would know such things.
Oliver Burkeman, who wrote a perceptive article that I feel is somewhat wasted in its magazine-ghetto placement, calls this "instrumentalization". It is "taking aspects of social existence we'd previously thought of as ends in themselves and turning them into means, co-opting them for other agendas".
An important thing to mention here is that the protagonists of networking don't see themselves as evil; they see themselves as facilitators. And I strongly believe that most of them are actually doing it, on a surface level, out of the goodness of their heart. However, that there are "non-monetary benefits" (my phrase) is surely lurking in the subconscious. It's not all philanthropy.
The problem is, it's very difficult now to tell the fake from the authentic. What friends are real friends, and which ones keep me on because I might be a useful contact in the future? I have no way of knowing, but if that person has 1,200 other friends on Facebook, I have a suspicion. The higher the number of "friends" such a person has, the less likely is that I am a genuine pal.
In this sense, Facebook is great. The network-friend collector is exposed to plain sight. Of course, most of the time such a person will be a flippertygibbit non-thinking collector, so one can't be absolutely certain.
I automatically reject friend requests from PR people these days; that became an automatic response quite early on. And I'm not comfortable with Facebook becoming what Dom seems to think it has already become. I become a fan of very few things. But I suspect, with rather a heavy heart, that Dom is right and I am wrong, that it's the way of the future.
__________________________
Personally I'm not so sure. I mean, filofaxes and rolodexes and Outlook's Calendar can do a lot of work for you. Maybe you spread youself a little bit more thinly, and I suspect that the number of people you can "efficiently" be real friends with might be a bit higher than it was when Croesus came up with the idea of coinage (yes, I know it was invented separately in other parts of the world at about the same time) as the new brilliant idea of the day, which meant that it didn't matter if the guy you were dealing with was a complete stranger. Maybe the number is up to, what? 200? Perhaps more, 300? Well, now I think we are stretching it.
So what of the people who collect many more than 150 friends? Thankfully we can measure this now -- Facebook is a great anthropological tool.
Initially the collection of as many friends as possible was reportedly a girlie school thing. Popularity is far more important than intelligence in the world; I know this now and I wish that I had known it then. In the cooperative-rather-than-overtly competitive land of schoolgirldom, the more friends you had, the "better" you were.
Then there's the flippertygibbit, the person who meets thousands of people and just facebooks the lot of them, without really thinking much about it.
But then there's the "networker", and I was reminded of this, darker, side of Facebook by a piece in today's Sunday Times magazine.
Actually, the thought had been triggered by an idle remark that Dom Sutton made in the pub. He said that "let's face it, Facebook is really about social marketing". Well, this actually hadn't occurred to me. I thought that the stuff that Neil Channing was coming out with was, basically, spam, a bastardization of what Facebook was "about". But then I thought about it. No, maybe Dom was right. After all, it's free, it has an audience. It's not so much a blog as a place for companies and people to push their wares.
The ST article this morning cites a complete cunt called Keith Ferrazi, a man who is such a lowlife shit that I might even have to go out there to buy his book. This man has spotted that your social circle has a value. The bigger your social circle, the more that you can introduce A to B, because A has what B needs, but A does not know B, then the more both A and B will be in your non-monetary debt. Your friends are, in other words, a resource. But eventually the tail wags the dog. You start accumulating friends because they are a resource, not because they are friends (remember the magic number of 150!). That's why these accumulators have rolodexes, because there is no way they can keep all of the information in their heads. But they need that information (birthday, name of kids, etc), because, if they were the freidsn that the networker is claiming them to be, he would know such things.
Oliver Burkeman, who wrote a perceptive article that I feel is somewhat wasted in its magazine-ghetto placement, calls this "instrumentalization". It is "taking aspects of social existence we'd previously thought of as ends in themselves and turning them into means, co-opting them for other agendas".
An important thing to mention here is that the protagonists of networking don't see themselves as evil; they see themselves as facilitators. And I strongly believe that most of them are actually doing it, on a surface level, out of the goodness of their heart. However, that there are "non-monetary benefits" (my phrase) is surely lurking in the subconscious. It's not all philanthropy.
The problem is, it's very difficult now to tell the fake from the authentic. What friends are real friends, and which ones keep me on because I might be a useful contact in the future? I have no way of knowing, but if that person has 1,200 other friends on Facebook, I have a suspicion. The higher the number of "friends" such a person has, the less likely is that I am a genuine pal.
In this sense, Facebook is great. The network-friend collector is exposed to plain sight. Of course, most of the time such a person will be a flippertygibbit non-thinking collector, so one can't be absolutely certain.
I automatically reject friend requests from PR people these days; that became an automatic response quite early on. And I'm not comfortable with Facebook becoming what Dom seems to think it has already become. I become a fan of very few things. But I suspect, with rather a heavy heart, that Dom is right and I am wrong, that it's the way of the future.
__________________________
