Social Media Hasn’t Enabled Us To ‘Scale’ Friend Capacity, Oxford Study Suggests

The illusion social media presents of streamlining friendships may have something to it — allowing us to pare down on rote announcements, invites or shares — but it hasn’t increased our capacity to connect meaningfully on a larger scale, new research out of Oxford indicates.

Social media has often been analyzed in regards to its potential to increase our connectivity in terms of binary units of “closeness.” That is to say, before social media, we physically lacked the capability to have hundreds of friends.

So now that there is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Vine, can we do more friend stuff? Not as such, the study suggests.

Researchers tracked “changes in the communication networks of 24 students in the UK over 18 months” as they transitioned in their lives — for instance, from uni to career. The university explains:

“At the beginning of the study, researchers ‘ranked’ members of each participant’s social network (friends and family) according to emotional closeness. They discovered that, in all cases, a small number of top-ranked, emotionally close people received a disproportionately large fraction of calls.”

The release adds that individual communication styles were a factor in the data, saying:

“Within this general pattern, however, there was clear individual-level variation. Each participant had a characteristic ‘social signature’ that depicted their particular way of allocating communication across the members of their social network.”

Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford Professor Robin Dunbar commented:

“As new network members are added, some old network members are either replaced or receive fewer calls … This is probably due to a combination of limited time available for communication and the great cognitive and emotional effort required to sustain close relationships.”

“It seems that individuals’ patterns of communication are so prescribed that even the efficiencies provided by some forms of digital communication (in this case, mobile phones) are insufficient to alter them.”

If the name sounds familiar, it’s because of the “Dunbar’s number” theory often discussed in relation to social media and social capacity.

Wow. In this day and age to make such an audacious statement as this author has so boldly done is downright heretical if not subversive to her career, very existence. Simply adding the term social media to your profile, resume, site description and you're automatically elevated to a new, rarified strata of privilege and opportunity. I imagine untold billions of dollars in diminished value in stock portfolios across the board at the start of trading in the morning.

I've never been one to be enamored with the whole social media farce, and to hear some one actually come out and make such a contrarian statement is an absolute breath of fresh air akin to proclaiming the Emperor has no clothes.

FB seems to be blocking a lot of people from not being able to utilize their entire set of tools for no reasons given. These people are being blocked from 3 months or longer. FB language on their page expressing says when blocked it will last between a few hours or few days; however, more and more people are stuck in cyberspace with nowhere to turn and wondering why they were blocked. People have written or called from the top of the company to the bottom with no response. These people are from all walks of life so it’s not really whether they are liberal or conservative or whatever. The bottom line is they can’t find out why they were blocked, they have been blocked for long periods of time and they can’t get anyone to respond.

I ran across something today that I find really interesting and odd. FB has an Impressum Contact form. It’s odd because it’s not in English at least in the legal sense of the word. The US and UK don’t recognize it except in mastheads or some such thing. Where the true sense of the law of this Impressum is for example Germany. Germany has to post legit phone numbers, email addresses and addresses. FB does post telephone numbers but they either don’t work(no one answers on main number)or it is a recording. I understand you can only message the top people in the company or depts hoping someone will read it; however, if you are lucky you may receive a form letter that will not help you. I do believe they publish their actual addresses.

I feel for these people because FB is IMO not doing the right thing. If you are going to have a company make some adjustments for people to actually contact you. I have seen some of these block messages from people and it doesn’t appear they should have been blocked at; but to leave them hanging out there is just plain stupid.

I know, I know, you will say leave FB to these people; but some of them really like to have fun on it.

Anyway, it appears there are serious misjudgments in FB way of handling and thinking of this situation and I hope these people get out of cyberspace.

Many friends are paring back their Facebook and other social media activities.

They’ve come to the realization all those likes are not people they would to dinner, they don’t know them or even really feel like they might have common interests.

It’s beginning to feel like it’s sub-kindergarten with all those those”likes” being synthetic “stars” next to their name and the level of excoriations are no longer about debate, exchange of ideas and simple shared thoughts.

It’s become a battlefield for militant keyboard ninjas to debase them, leaving the experience not just unfullfilling but, painful and not worth interaction of an increasingly militant battlefield.

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