Comment: Vindication!

It’s official: there is an upper limit to the number of people you can sustain in your social circle.

It’s true.

All this 200 Facebook friends is an oxymoron.

According to an article in The Economist, there is an optimum number of people one can have and sustain in a social circle. That number is 150. In fact, it’s called the Dunbar circle, named after Robin Dunbar, an Oxford University anthropologist. He says that your brain is limited in how much social networking you can actually sustain and handle.

And according to surveys on Facebook use and the intimacy levels therein, even for people with 150 plus friends, their major usage/interaction only involves a handful of said persons. That means that I may have 89 friends, but I really only spend time with about five of them. In other words, less than ten percent of the people you “friend” are really your friends.

At least that’s this article’s (and my) interpretation. 300 friends are not sustainable, except in the loosest sense of the word.

From the article:
“People who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle.” "

Yeah, me and The Economist, we're all over it.