Facebook, facebook, facebook… It’s all about facebook these days, and it’s even gotten to the level where pretty much everyone is checking their facebook at least once a day. Well, not really, but almost 50% of the people on facebook are checking it as soon as they wake up and continuously monitoring it during the day. I read somewhere that a human being can only interact and keep in mind a maximum of 150 friends or so. This is quite interesting to know since we keep adding new friends to our facebook pretty much daily. Whether we keep in regular contact with them or not is of course not the point, but if we were, then we wouldn’t be able to keep track of them all if we managed to get over 150 friends… which it seems most people have.
To keep up with everything going in our network, we apparently need bigger brains if we are to expand our personal friends network beyond 150 people. The fact that we spend almost an hour on social networking each day in general is staggering, and the odd thing is that nowadays we talk to our friends more on facebook than we do in real life. Is this something we should be alarmed about? I think not. The level of conversation and the topics are far wider online than they are in real life, so it might actually be better.
However, to expand our social network size, as said previously, we need to evolve bigger brains in order to be able to cope with the constant stream of information that our brains are hammered with on a daily basis. That will of course take a lot of time, and until we do, how can we solve this quite intriguing problem? Maybe we should start categorizing our friends into different periods of the day. In the morning you take care of the one lot of 150 friends, and in the evening you take care of the second lot of people. That way, you could keep track of at least 300 friends. Would you be able to remember what you did in the morning after you had taken care of the evening lot? That’s the key question here. Hmm, what a dilemma!
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