What kind of happiness does technology procure then? And why do people remain both enthralled and unsatisfied by it? (Borgmann, 130 [1])
Facebook
provides mnemonic tools for keeping track of family and acquaintances. More
than this, of course, it provides the very tools of friendship itself. Assuming that the nature of friendship has
not budged much since Aristotle wrote about it, this means that for Facebook to
be a one-stop companionship-shop it must allow for friendships based upon use,
pleasure, and the exchange of well-wishing expressed purely for the sake of the
other. I will have more to say about
this later, but at first pass this can translate into commercial
acquaintanceships, mutual affinities between those who share an interest, and
finally the reciprocation of mutual respect between people of fine character – BFFs,
in other words.
One of the
implications of Facebook use, according to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, is that
is slows the decay-rate of friendship [2]. Facebook allows us to collate intimates from
the fragmented geographies of our contemporary lives and to sustain contact
with friends from our past with whom we might otherwise only have sporadic
contact. As I discussed in a recentpost, Facebook may be, in fact, just one of a progression of technologies that
allow us to keep track of our personal human networks (our “tribe”) when these
extend beyond Dunbar’s number, that is, those 150 people predicted to be within
the “natural” limit of our information-retention ability. This limit, Dunbar claimed, is set by the
size of our neocortex [3].
The hallmark of
technologies that allow us to have more than 150 familiars is that they
increase the efficiency of the processes required for social bonding. It takes less time to “like” my mother’s
Facebook comment about her recent trip to Killarney than it does to call her,
and both call for less time than visiting her kitchen in Dublin! Innovations that allow us maintain networks in
a highly time-efficient way free up the brain for a larger circle of
chums. These innovations include
language itself which, Dunbar and colleagues claim is more time-efficient than
social grooming [4].
So assuming that the sequence goes from
grooming to language to telephone…and on to Facebook, then new virtual
networking tools emerge at the end of a respectable pedigree of social
contrivances.
At least it can be said that with Facebook one gets the social juices without ingesting the nits and other ectoparasites than that come with more primordial forms of primate grooming.
At least it can be said that with Facebook one gets the social juices without ingesting the nits and other ectoparasites than that come with more primordial forms of primate grooming.
