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peterbirksIt'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.
__________________________
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no subject
Date: 2010-03-07 08:14 pm (UTC)Ferrazzi is not as clever as he thinks he is (and I can save you the trouble of buying his book - just read my review). But I found the biggest irony was that in the end he actually exhorts people to at least pretend to be nice even if their hearts aren't in it, out of self-interest. I know too many people who feel constrained to be nasty to everyone, deserved or not, and I know my life is made easier by people being nice to me even if it is not completely sincere.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-07 08:31 pm (UTC)I don't think that "despise" is the right term. Indeed, I was going to write in this piece above: "I count many of them among my friends", but then I realized that this in itself begged the question "do they count me the same way?"
I think where our opinions might part (although I make no judgements on this, I just express my personal preference) is , if your answer to the question: "do you keep written notes of personal things such as these people's kids' names, or their wife's name" etc?" is "yes", then my point would be that they can't be a real friend, but your keeping these notes is to make you appear to them as a real friend. It's a falsity that I don't like. However, if you can keep these things in your head, or if you just say "I'm sorry, I've forgotten your son's name", then that's genuine. And if it makes both you and the person on the receiving end of such a falsity happier then, well, good luck all round!
However, you part answer this, (and we part company in opinion) when you write "I know my life is made easier by people being nice to me even if it is not completely sincere". I just can't handle this in life. I know that it makes me the oddball, and not you. But I really do find myself taking some odd kind of moral (and therefore judgemental) stance here. I could never be insincere to make someone else's life easier, because I think that this just stores up more problems for later on. And I would never want anyone else to be insicnere to make my life easier, for the same reason. So many times the conversation has been along the lines "I didn't say that because I didn't want to hurt his/her feelings" when (for me) the underlying text is "I didn't say that because I want to be liked, and the bearers of bad news aren't ever liked". That leaves some other poor bastard (usually me!) to take the role of "Mr Bad Guy" and be the one who makes people face the truth.
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no subject
Date: 2010-03-07 08:41 pm (UTC)2) That Ferrazi puts journalists on the list. I think that this might be (a) an American kind of thing and (b) slightly out of date. In my niche journalist world (business, specifically insurance) you don't need a gazillion contacts; and those that I have are easy to find -- why would they need to be a "friend" on Facebook. I think that here there's a big difference between LinkedIn and Facebook. A "contact" is just that. There's no pretence at friendship, remembering the person's wife's name, meeting socially, etc. But I would positively bar these as friends on acebook and would not count them as friends in any meaningful sense, because I never think about them except when I need something from them.
If you only every think about a person when you need something from them, or when someone else needs something and you think that another person in your list of contacts could supply it, then that person is not a friend -- he's part of your social network. I would contend that these are two very different things.
PJ
no subject
Date: 2010-03-07 08:52 pm (UTC)Compare this, however, with the type (whom I am sure you recognize) who seems to remember a personal detail about every individual he meets at a party. He/she is always smiling, never spends more than four minutes in a conversation with a single individual, and is constantly "working the room". This person is A FAKE. Not only that, he/she is an obvious fake. So why do people fall for it? Perhaps, as you say, people know that it's insincere, but they feel that the world is a better place for it.
PJ
I love you, Birks
Date: 2010-03-07 09:13 pm (UTC)Please don't ruin our relationship by watching The Blues Brothers (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080455/) again.