Friendships in the social media age
As of this paragraph, Mark Zuckerberg says I have 4,495 friends on Facebook. But I’m much more popular than that. You see, I have three Facebook pages. On my second page, I have another 3,024 friends. On page three, there’s 1,496 more.
So, collectively I’ve managed to accumulate 9,015 social media chums, 25 of whom I have actually met.
But even this doesn’t begin to reflect the enormity of my personal popularity. “Mr. Charisma” has expanded his reach beyond Facebook.
On Twitter, 1,117 people follow me, hopefully from a safe distance. And, shockingly, 1,035 people even see my Instagram posts. “Shockingly,” because nothing says hard pass more than a 63-year-old newspaper columnist on Instagram, with the possible exception of a 63-year-old newspaper columnist with an OnlyFans account.
Undoubtedly, I’ve lost a few over the years with my muddleheaded newspaper opinions and I’m sure to lose a few more after this column hits the newsstands. Still, to have so many friends this late in life makes me feel loved, wanted, engaged and utterly baffled. What does all this friending and following and liking mean? According to one British anthropologist, not much.
Dr. Robin Dunbar has crunched the numbers and determined, for a successful life,
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letters@dailybreeze.com (Please do not include any attachments) the average person needs five “intimate” friends, 12 to 15 “supportive” friends, backed by approximately 130 “casual” friends, which means jackets and ties are not required for these people.
According to the selfdescribed “mathematician of relationships,” Dunbar claims there is a subset of 50 friends within our collection of “casuals” — people we might invite to our birthday parties but not to a dinner party where we’d be stuck talking to them for an entire evening.
Dunbar’s “Three Tiers of Friendship” illustrates each level by the degree of commitment our friends are obliged to demonstrate. For example: regular friends are the people we see at weddings, class reunions or at the dog park. We might wave to these people and even say hello if cornered. Supportive friends are the people who will be genuinely distraught when we die. I assume because we owe them money. Intimate friends are those rare birds who would actually donate a kidney if we were in the market for one. My problem is, I know what shape my intimate friends’ kidneys are in, so I’d have better luck on the black market.
Of course, Dunbar is a Brit, and I’m not convinced his standards of friendship actually translate to America, especially Southern California, so
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I’ve done my own research and here’s what I’ve concluded:
Regular friends are the people who at one point were deemed important enough to add to our contacts, but not important enough to ever engage with. These are the names we scroll past on our iPhones but never actually call. If you live in Los Angeles, this category may also include your neighbors — the people we see all the time but wouldn’t recognize if we bumped into them at Gelson’s.
Supportive friends have only one real obligation. They are the people who text us a sad face emoji when our mothers die.
Which brings us to the most exalted of friends, our intimates. Yes, intimate friends are the people we can trust with our secrets, ask to feed our cats while we take a river cruise and know they’ll be alive when we get home, and lastly, in Los Angeles at least, intimate friends are the people who actually drive us to LAX rather than simply offer to drive us.
So, if you are one of the 9,015 people I call “friend” online, and should our paths cross in actual life, please say hello, and I beg you, tell me your name because I likely have no idea who you are. And please don’t take it personally; after all, it’s just modern friendship.
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