Posts Tagged ‘values’
Calgary Writer Re-evaluates Facebook friend list: What is your Dunbar number?
Jean Symborski
I have an inability to accept when things are over. I imagine that if I work hard enough, things would last forever – namely friendships. Facebook encourages this false sense of permanence in friendships. Even when a conversation with an old friend can’t move past small talk, you are still free to know intimate details about their life by simply clicking on their Facebook profile. Nowadays, “friend” has almost no meaning.
I don’t know how many friends I have in real life, but I certainly don’t have several hundred, like on my Facebook list.
In fact in 1992, a British anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, theorized that the human brain is only capable of maintaining 150 stable relationships. Since then, his idea has been referred to as Dunbar’s number. Now with Facebook, scientists have reviewed Dunbar’s number and they hypothesized that despite our large friends’ lists, Dunbar was right, we are only capable of maintaining an inner -circle relationship with about 100 to 200 people.
Occasionally, I feel the need to purge my friends list. Several dozen are vague acquaintances that I met one time or had a class with one semester, who I added in some strange need to solidify the meeting. Like the LinkedIn connection without business cards. Few things are more satisfying than going through this list of people, whose relationships with me have come to a confused cry of “Who the heck is that?” when a post of theirs appears on my newsfeed. It feels good to get rid of those people because it reminds me that some other connections are worth keeping. If some people are easy to delete off a list, they hold no emotional weight and don’t deserve the title of “friend.”
There are also friendships that are harder to take off the list. Sure, before the Internet, I probably would have just stopped speaking to them, but social media is a bittersweet reminder of the friendship we once had, and wish we still had. Although the person I was once friends with is no longer calling or texting like they used to, there is still a profile out there that bears the same name. Facebook encourages you to hold on to these connections, and somehow making the move to get rid of someone whom you were once really close to is just too hard to do.
Taking the concrete step of defriending someone isn’t as simple as deleting the fluff friends of social media, those people who never had bearing on my life and never will. Deletion of someone who used to be important is truly burning a bridge. To stop talking to this person altogether, to admit that even seeing their online presence is an odd combination of uncomfortable and unpleasant, is the stuff of real break-ups. And so I’m tempted to keep them around because, an awkward non-friendship is better than cutting them out altogether. That would be a real death to the friendship, so I’d rather keep it on life support.
I often think about quitting Facebook and social media altogether, and I could technically shut the thing down – the Earth wouldn’t fall off its axis and collide with the sun if I did.
I lived without status updates five years ago, and although living without them now would probably not make much of difference for my daily life, except then I remember those family and friends that make both my Dunbar number and my Facebook friends’ list.
So next time you sign online, think of your Dunbar number. Are you really capable of maintaining 1,367 friendships?
Complexity, Relationships, Strange Loops: Reflexive Practice
Today, organizations are downsizing, reorganizing, rightsizing, redesigning, and re-engineering in an attempt to be effective in a turbulent and uncertain marketplace. Although meant to help, more often than not, these initiatives do not come close to what is necessary for organizations to thrive in this complex world. They often fall short because they ignore the key aspects of an organization: its people and the relationships they form that allow work to be done effectively. Without people, there is no organization. Without resilient relationships among the people within an organization there is no high performance.
Everything that we do, as individuals and as groups, involves relationships. These relationships can be with our own ideas, assumptions, and values, with other people, with our jobs, or with the organization. Every situation is defined by its relationships. Fragile relationships translate into inefficiencies, ineffectiveness, low productivity, and a lack of innovation. Resilient relationships translate into high levels of effectiveness, productivity, and innovation.
No matter how resilient it is, every relationship experiences ups and downs over time. Like riding a roller coaster, sometimes we feel great in our relationships, and other times we feel overwhelmed by the strange loops these relationships manifest. To create and sustain relationships that work, we need to understand them, and how we, and others, function within them. Reflexive practice helps us to ride the strange loops that relationships create so we can develop and sustain resilience, and be prepared for other relationship roller coasters that may come our way.
We’re a leading-edge research and development company that focuses on building your organization’s capacity to meet the challenges of the 21st Century. We work with you to produce measurable results, so that you can learn at the speed of change. We research, field-test, and evaluate a variety of thinking and learning processes to identify which ones produce high performance.