Gold Friends

A few months ago I joined Facebook and became a part of the social networking community. My friend, Elle, who has more than 100 friends, recruited me, and I must admit it took me awhile to get the hang of it. At first. I found it intimidating. After all, as a "newby" with only one friend, I felt like a kid who had just transferred to a new school, wondering if I'd ever meet anyone. Suddenly, the pressure was on. I looked through my contacts and sent out a few friend requests, and while they didn't all respond, I have manged to collect more than a handful. Okay, so I'm not as popular as some, but I have enough friends to keep me entertained when it's too cold or wet to play outside and long after I should have gone to bed. Never the social butterfly, I couldn't help but wonder what the average number of friends in a Facebook network actually was. Was I in the ballpark or out in left field?

As it often happens, when I pose open-ended questions of this nature, the answer often comes to me in unexpected ways. I was at the dentists' office when I picked up the February 28th-March 6th 2009 issue of The Economist. The cover listed the article, "Facebook and your primate past." As I perused the article, it quickly became apparent that I wasn't the only one asking this question.

It turns out that sociologists distinguish between a person's wider network and their social core. According to the in-house sociologist at Facebook, the average number of "friends" in a Facebook network is 120; however the number of people a friend interacts with on a regular basis is remarkably small and stable. The average man generally responds to posting of only seven of those friends; and the average woman responds to ten. When it comes to two-way communication like e-mails or chats the number for men is 4 and the number for women is 6. What mainly goes up is not the core network, but the number of casual contact that people track more passively.

Having had more than my share of casual acquaintances in the 80's, I'm more than happy with the less than average number of friends I have acquired. Most of them are what I consider to be GOLD friends--they've known me for a long time; or know me really well, and are as precious as gold, which if you've been paying attention, closed at 938.48/oz last Friday. This doesn't mean I'm not open to expanding my social network. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, a high school friend found me and catching up with her was more fun than watching Lost. Just today, while perusing a friend's collection of friend, I found more people I had completely lost touch with. These contacts turned an ordinary Saturday into a memorable one.

Maybe, one of these days, I'll increase my friend collection, but for now, I'm appreciating my pile of gold.