The Trouble with Facebook - or - Facebook and the solitary practice of friendship

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.

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.

Abandonment, nostalgia and the technology of human landscapes

In the coming weeks I will be "checking in" on my understanding of how environmental thinkers have regarded technological development.  I had started writing on this theme a couple of years ago.  This is what I have so far on this theme.
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In Italo Calvino’s fable Baron in the Trees the young Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò retreated from a family dinnertime squabble and took to the trees vowing never to return to the ground again. His act, a reversal of the flow of human evolutionary history, brought the impetuous baron back to humanities’ primordial dwelling-place. This recapitulation necessitated compromises. The baron abandoned his tunics, his stockings, his powdered coiffure (the year is 1767), and over the course of the years he modified his habits and equipped himself for life in the canopy. Reacclimatizing to the ancestral habitat his body warped and, by the end of his long life, he may not have been able to return to solid ground even had he chose to do so. The baron’s retreat was merely an extreme gesture in the relationship between people and primeval landscapes – a relationship defined by abandonment and the subsequent scramble for adaptation. It is a simultaneously optimistic and nostalgic affair. Accommodating our relationship with landscapes of the past, the abandoned wilderness from which we created our modern human landscapes is one of the challenges of our times. The prospects and problems associated with loss of wildness are inarguably a legacy of technology. Whether or not technology can assist us in solving the problems that technology created remains a matter for debate. Up for debate also is whether the protection of the wild can be assisted by technology.

Despite the many excellences of the human body – the dexterous grip of the hand, the engineered precision of stereoscopic vision, the marvels of bipedality, the hitching of gristle and flesh to gracile but sturdy bones, the preposterous engorgement of the human brain – we are nevertheless no more than adequately provisioned for the physically taxing world in which we live. We are creatures – rare when considering the sweep of creation – trapped between the heavens and the earth: confined to the surface of the soil. To take possession of a new habitat, or even to retreat to one from our past (as seen in the case of the baron), is achieved only with great difficulty. The primeval human animal, newly descended like a tremulous god from the canopies of east African forests, was a succulent, vulnerable thing. The irredeemably terrestrial nature of our lungs yields the aquatic realm unlivable to us. The interstices of the soil, snug and receptive to perhaps a majority of living things, are not a home for the hulking hominid. A glance overhead at birds and insects (and the occasional mammals) is to peer into a distance world. And we are an undefended and doubtlessly a tasty morsel – a fact attested to by our sociality (primate vulnerability, it seems, loves company). Despite human physical limitations we have extended our reach to all of these seemingly foreclosed worlds. We have plumbed the depths of the oceans, flown through the atmosphere, and penetrated deep within the earth. The means by which we have overcome these limitations is through our capacity for technology.