Facebook and the Availability of Friendship

To be a friend to many people in the complete kind of friendship is not possible Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII

There is a nice moment in Desmond Morris’ documentary “The Human Zoo” where, as he ponders the means by which the human animal deals with dense urban living, he hoists his address book and declares: “This is his [the urban dweller’s] personal tribe!”  People in cities don’t, of course, have intimate personal dealings with all their fellow denizens, rather they interact with a small circle of friends, family, close associates.  Now, the membership of personal tribes does not fully overlap, and thus networks of interactions radiate out to include the entire population.  The central insight here is that arguably we have replicated a primordial social condition of people, though in a greatly modified way, in the city.

From a social evolutionary perspective such as Morris encouraged we can ask how many people might we typically have in our personal address books?  Twenty years ago, anthropologist Robin Dunbar provided an answer.  That answer: 150!  This is, he claimed, the number of people we might “naturally” interact with.  Numbers of intimates greater than this call for a special explanation.  In contemporary times information-communications technologies (ICTs): cell phones, Facebook, Skype, twitter and so on, may assist in extending the scope of our social networks [1].  Having an “external memory” can amplify our essential capacity for friendship.  And amplifying our otherwise stubbornly restricted somatic capabilities is what technology does best, after all.