The number of interactions between people has increased, but their quality may have fallen
“You have enough friends and you don’t need a new friend,” says touchy character Max from
Forget and Remember [Kicking and Screaming], a cult film by Noah Baumbak of 1995, when one of the four college friends tries to introduce them to the fifth boyfriend “If you try to spread your affection too much, it will thin out, trust me.”
This sending of twenty years ago may seem outdated, but remember the period in which the film takes place, and how its characters interact. Communication over landlines is the norm. Writing long messages to an answering machine and paper mail plays a serious emotional role. Friends gather in bars without external distractions and with minimal chances of making plans with other people on the fly.
All this seems outdated and odd compared to how the socialization of 20-year-olds is happening today. Calls, long voice messages, paper mail (probably even long emails) are a thing of the past. Nightly meetings with friends are interrupted by the immediate placement of posts in social networks and frequent photographing, as well as other applications on the phone, distracting attention.
In retrospect, the time of the film — the 90s — was the last decade in which relatively few technological obstacles appeared that interfered with the traditional level of “consistency” of friendship. Social networks and smartphones are much more capable of spreading affection, and friendship becomes thinner.
“My network is spreading wider” than in the past, says Lucy Schiller, 29, who recently graduated from the University of Iowa with a diploma in writing documentaries. “It’s much easier for me to communicate with a lot of people. I don’t know if this is a side product of growing up, but it seems to me that the parameters of friendship have changed. I would like to think that friendship includes long walks and conversations face to face, some joint activities - but at the moment it seems that all this is a thing of the past, and we are moving along very interesting, but very light-weight relationships. ”
Regarding the impact of new technologies on close friendship and social exclusion, two statistics are often quoted by the American GSS Public Opinion Research Center in 1985 and 2004. The average number of trusted people during this time fell from 2.94 to 2.08, and the number of people who do not have trusted acquaintances jumped from one-tenth to nearly one-fourth.
By themselves, this data is a suicidal accusation of connections in the Internet era, even in 2004, when social networks were in their infancy, in the form of MySpace and Friendster, and the iPhone did not yet exist.
But in 2011, a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania at the direction of Kate Hampton
found evidence that "close social connections do not deteriorate when using the Internet, and that Internet users usually have large private networks of social connections", as well as social exclusion in 2008 th year lower than in 1985
The researchers also determined that the size of the network of “main proxies” is very strongly associated with two popular social networks entertainment: instant messaging and uploading photos. People with a mobile phone and engaged in this, have a network of 34% more than others.
In other papers Hampton argues that the Internet and social networks can contribute to the emergence of offline social connections.
One states that “Internet use can be associated with an increased level of participation in traditional events that support the formation of diverse networks,” for example, visiting public places or getting to know a large number of neighbors.
Another says that people who often use Facebook have closer and more diverse social connections than the average American - although the total number of connections is practically the same.
Wedding and funeral guests
These discoveries are consistent with the research of
Robin Dunbar , professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford. He put forward the theory that the “size of a group” in humans and other primates — the number of people (or, say, chimpanzees) with which an individual can maintain social ties — correlates with the “relative size of the cortex”, with the size of the cerebral cortex relative to his overall size.
The often cited
Dunbar number for people averages 150 acquaintances (in fact, ranges from 100 to 200). These people can come to your wedding or funeral.
In this registry, there are internal levels of proximity, decreasing three times when moving from one to another. 50 people from this list are transferred to the category of friends, 15 are good friends, 5 are proxies, 1.5 are the closest people (and vice versa, we can remember about 500 acquaintances and compare about 1500 persons with names).
One would assume that boasting by thousands of friends and followers from social networks would inflate the Dunbar number, but Dunbar himself claims that "nothing like this happens." In a recent job analyzing data from Facebook and Twitter, and another that studied mobile phone calls, his team determined that “people still show the same frequency of interactions as face-to-face” for appropriate levels of intimacy, said he.
However, digital channels “do not distinguish the quality of relationships,” he said. - They allow you to maintain relationships that would otherwise have disappeared. Our data shows that if you do not meet with the person with the desired frequency, he will fall through the levels of relationships until he drops out of 150 and becomes “someone you once knew.” We believe that if you do not meet a person in person, social networks slow down this fading rate. ”
As a result, there may be an excess of old friends who are not so easy to forget online, stifling the development of new personal relationships.
“Your time available for socialization is limited, and you can spend it in face-to-face meetings, or on the Internet,” said Dunbar. If you hold it with people who are “distant” from you, geographically, or simply because you communicate with them digitally, “you will not have time to invest in new relationships where you are.”
Is there mutual understanding?
People from our past, with whom we no longer communicate directly, but who are active in social networks, can “colonize the valuable space of your mind, and you will think about them instead of your closest friends,” says Carlin Flora, author of the book “The Influence of Friends : The Amazing Ways Our Friends Form Us ”[Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends]
“If my friend from school often makes posts about his life, it’s very similar to how I follow a celebrity’s life, or watch a reality show,” Flora said. “Our brains are confused about whether celebrities are familiar to us; if we often see someone, our brain begins to believe that it is our friend. ”
Of course, to assume that we know people on the basis of updating their statuses (or paparazzi photos) is not the same as spending time with them - just like the inscription “happy birthday!” On the wall on Facebook emotionally has less influences than congratulations, made in person or by phone.
Flora noted the benefits of digital media for introverts and people prone to loneliness - contacting a person via text message or post will be less risky and difficult than through a phone call or meeting.
With a lower threshold needed to support friendships, some people definitely prefer interaction over the network to live communication, especially
millennials who are used to constant communication through devices.
Schiller, a graduate student from Iowa, not only often walks with friends in the evenings, but also sits on a digital text messaging diet (and is so active that she recently changed her thumb muscles), Google Chat and social networks. She says that talking on Google Chat seems trivial to her, probably because she uses it during simultaneous work on several tasks on computers, but, nevertheless, sometimes he helps people to open up more than they could by talking personally.
As with many millennials, she does not often talk on the phone - it happens in very rare cases. “I asked people at Gchat if they want to talk on the phone and they start to ruffle,” she says. “It can be tedious, there’s no such freedom.”
However, personal meetings have physiological benefits that do not apply to digital interaction. “Blood pressure levels out, you synchronize, unconsciously imitate your friend’s posture,” Flora says. “This is a mutual understanding that people have developed over thousands of years, and nothing like this can be obtained just by following someone on social networks” (according to Dunbar, Skype and other similar programs can still be compared to live communication).
But now this synchronization is constantly violated by the presence of smartphones. Imagine
Edward Hopper's 1942 picture of the
Midnight in a modern setting, in which three late diners and a seller gaze at the screens.
“If several guys got together in a bar and they all stared at their phones,” says Dunbar, “they do nothing to activate the endorphin system, which creates a feeling of interconnectedness.”
Since representatives of
generation X , for example, Flora, based their active youth in their youth, mainly on personal relationships and constant phone calls, moving to digital friendship, they “can take advantage of its advantages,” she says. “But I’m worried about younger people sacrificing precious personal communication, not feeling, and not adjusting to what their friends think or feel.”
Speaking about the likely reduced possibility of forming deep friendships among the representatives of her generation, Schiller expressed a rather resonant thought.
“Maybe it's in me,” she said.