Social media networking for friendship has increased over last few years. We have many friends on social media and many people boost on the number of friends they have on Facebook. Does it really matter to have 1000, 700 or 500 friends? Are your online buddies, your real friends? A research carried out by University of Oxford, says that, the number of real on-line buddies you’ve, is substantially different from your offline buddies. Their findings indicate that face to face interactions are necessary to acquire camaraderie. Study is published in Royal Society open science journal.

Research indicates that there’s a limitation to exactly how many buddies a person can have. It is because the capability to process multiple relationships of our brain creates an all-natural group size of 100-200 individuals. That is known as the Social Brain Hypothesis. This group size can also be constrained by the time needed to keep relationships – we just have so much time to commit to meeting or speaking to folks. This study was based on offline world where face to face communication was the only way to remain in touch.

But, what about on-line friendships? It’s been implied that the constraints might beat by social media because tweets, posts and images enable us to speak to many more individuals at once, even though the interaction isn’t direct. Psychology professor Robin Dunbar, carried out survey twice on more than 3300 individuals to check out, how internet influenced number of their friends.

What he found out was amazing. The typical amount of friend’s people had on Facebook was 155 in the initial survey whereas in next survey it was 183. Girls had more friends than guys (In the initial sample, girls averaged 166 and guys only 145 buddies; in the next, it was 196 vs 157), while – perhaps unsurprisingly – old generations had fewer friends than younger ones. The initial survey group, made up of frequent social media users, considered just 28% of their Facebook friends to be ‘real’ (i.e. close) buddies. When, asked about the number of friends that would help in need, then the number turned out was 4 and 14 friends in respective surveys. These figures are not very different when compared to offline findings of the Social Brain Hypothesis.

Social media doesn’t create difference between close and more distant relationships. Due to which the list of number of friends list increases. Whereas in real world, our mind distinguishes between the two. Although online media assists to keep us hanged on any relationship but Professor Robin Dunbar described: that to have real relationships, you need to maintain face to face communication.

[adinserter block=”7″]

Author: Technology Blog