Technology

OPINION: Do you really need all those Social Media Friends?

By Joseph Lubandi

Posted on December 18, 2017

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While I don’t cogitate about the meaning of Slay Queen in different languages or who qualifies for the Slay Queen throne, social networks and the constant roll of new connection requests keeps me wondering if it is possible to have too many friends or too many network connections, whether business or social. When I joined Facebook back in 2010, I started with a few friends, (most of them classmates and relatives), then their friends started coming, and then the friends of their friends, It went crazy. Right now I don’t even know most of the people that send me requests. But they can’t stop coming through.

I was almost reaching friend limit and then decided to periodically add a must do on my to-do list that I pull off with a deep sigh; trimming and pruning of the people that I have added to my network with time, requests that I accepted that seemed like a good idea at the time. Luckily, I don’t expect any conflict when I remove most of these people as many of those removed won’t notice. They will probably just add me again having forgotten that we’ve been through this previously.

There is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships, which has been estimated to be between 10 and 230. In these relationships, an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Advocates aver that numbers bigger than this naturally require more restrictive rules and enforced norms to maintain a stable relationship. The only problem is this number neglects the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, and the people just generally knew with a lack of persistent social relationship, a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size.

The biggest issue for today’s Slay Queens and Slay Kings is Facebook; Most are guilty of sending and accepting many too many requests in a bid to earn as many likes as they can possibly get. I personally try as much not to cross the 1500 friends Tower of Babel and I mercilessly apply the guillotine, though my connections continue to reproduce faster than rabbits. I am not moved (much) by the number of likes I get when I post a status or upload a new pic. Only thing I ever care about is getting in touch with my friends and family. So I keep my friend list as clear of strangers as possible. Perhaps my perception of social media changed.

The point may just be that social networks are defined by stable social relationships, not the number of friends, connections, views, reactions or likes accumulated on a so-called social networking site. I don’t see much point in maintaining a list of relationships that aren’t all that stable, to begin with. Why should you have over 200 people on chat yet you only have jazz with only a quarter of those?