Social media changed the ways that people create and maintain social relationships. With increased usage of social media, people are able to easily maintain connections with a variety of different people. While relationships such as those across long distances previously required more effort and time, users of social media platforms are able to minimize this distance through virtual space.
The average number of Facebook friends a user has is 336, while the upper limit to Facebook connections is 5,000, Dunbar suggests that the maximum size of an individual’s personal network is 150. Network size is determined by the capacity of an individual’s “social brain”, which the amount of information they can process on those in their networks.
This number as we understand it, has a series of layers of embedded relationships, with the outer most layer pertaining to people who you know an individual rather than those who you recognize but only have causal relationships with. A social networks consists of four layers, “the Circles of Acquaintanceship” which containing relationships with varying levels of depth, with the inner most circle containing the five people you are closest to.
As Rainie and Wellman point out, larger networks have greater health benefits. A greater number of people we are connected to leads to a greater diversity in types of ties and nuances in relationships. By creating larger networks we are able to have more specialized relationships which fit more needs. We may have small networks of people to talk to about pressing issues, but we have a greater variety of people to talk about different things, which is a big selling point of social media. Social media allows people to create specialized networks regardless of location, age, or other factors. Someone who might be relatively isolated in their day to day in person interactions, can find people with similar interests with relative ease through social media. In turn this can provide health benefits such as decreasing loneliness. “Being on the internet is associated with having both more friends and a greater increase in the number of friends over time.” (Rainie and Wellman, 2012) However, this idea is also dependent on the ways in which people utilize social media.
Larger social networks supposedly provide more support, but in the case on online social media, the more time college students spent online, the less they had for building new friendships on campus, leading to increased feelings of loneliness. (Ludden, 2018) In the case of seniors however, who were using their Facebook to communicate with friends on campus, they felt more connected. A potential difference between the two is the size of the networks they were exploiting. While younger students who were new would potentially feel the need to connect to many people from their home, older students would be more likely to have a close group of local friends to speak with. By having this close and small group they are able to form deep bonds, potentially the kind that Rainie and Wellman spoke about as individuals with whom to discuss serious matters. From this it appears that a small networks would have more beneficial connections because of the assumption that these relationships would be deeper. However, larger networks are considered to be more beneficial.
Larger networks provide more opportunities for information to be passed along. Larger in-person networks are more diverse and provide mental health benefit such as feelings of connectedness and more information, they also provide immunity to infectious diseases by exposure to minor infections. (Rainie and Wellman, 2012) Larger online networks provide greater individual support and greater social capital for each person in the network. Social media has made it easier for an individual to be a part of these larger networks which provide a great number of benefits for them. While Dunbar claims 150 to be the maximum number of meaningful ties, other studies cite this number to be as high as 600.
The possibility of this many connections gives an individual the opportunity to find connections in all areas of their life. They can find deep ties both online and offline, allowing them to create a mixed network of virtual and in-person connections to fulfill a variety of needs.
References:
Rainie, L., & Wellman, B. (2012). Networked: The new social operating system. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ludden, D. (2018, January 24). Does Using Social Media Make You Lonely? Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-apes/201801/does-using-social-media-make-you-lonely