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I’ve been on the internet for over 20 years. When I initially got on the net I remember interacting with people who lived in England, and it was so cool! At one point I recall getting into a talk session with someone who lived in Ecuador. If you lived through the era of Wired circa 1995 to 1999 you remember all the talk about how the internet was going to make location irrelevant, and we were going to congeal into a world cross-linked by cyber-connections. In the mid-2000s the Second Life boomlet brought back some of those feelings, but that faded.
Unlike many Americans I have a lot of family abroad. One of my Facebook friends is my cousin who happens to be a religious teacher and brought up in Tablighi Jamaat by an uncle who has long been a partisan of that movement. I know this cousin a bit (I met him when I visited Bangladesh in 1990 and 2004), and he’s a nice enough fellow. He even likes some of my personal events (e.g., the births of my children). We’ve had chat sessions here and there. Since my “religion” is put as “atheist” on my profile he also knows that about me (he double-checked with me when he became my Facebook friend).
I bring all this up because I hardly ever interact with the cousins who are on Facebook who live abroad. Rather, my Facebook feed is mostly devoted to those who I grew up with in the states, and in particular those who I work with, or went to school with recently. Basically what you’d expect. Facebook has over 1 billion users, but we’re all in our own cultural silos, chattering amongst ourselves. This isn’t totally surprising, and today it seems banal. Yes, there are millions of people from India on Facebook, but they’re not part of my social graph, and won’t be…unless they immigrate to the United States.
When the internet was young we didn’t anticipate many things about its later development. One was that rather than transforming our social networks, it would simply facilitate them. Yes, e-mail and Facebook have changed the way we interact and socialize. But they’ve probably just amplified and smoothed preexisting trends, rather than change the underlying dynamic.
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You can’t inflate Dunbar’s number with mere electronics.
1) people actually argued with me about that! not sure they'd argue now
2) there is some debate as to the robustness of dunbar's specific number, though i think the general point that there's a natural (constrained) range is really all that matters in this context....
two points
1) people actually argued with me about that! not sure they’d argue now
2) there is some debate as to the robustness of dunbar’s specific number, though i think the general point that there’s a natural (constrained) range is really all that matters in this context….
I don’t use Facebook (or any “social media”), so I have no clue. In what way does Facebook facilitate friendships?
I always thought it was for giggly teenage girls, so I am frequently astounded to find that reasonably intelligent adults use it. Does it really add real value to friendships? Also, what about privacy concerns?
Regarding privacy, you can choose to keep your posts among friends or open to the public. But you have no control over what your friends and family publish, and whether they choose to keep their content (which includes details and pictures about you) private or public. In fact, you don't even have to possess a Facebook account to lose your privacy; as long as someone you know has an account and is publishing authentic information about you, you lose privacy. The ability to share content easily is part of the DNA of Facebook, so this problem just can't be fixed in my opinion.Replies: @Twinkie
My experience with the Internet in general, and Facebook in particular, has not been the same.
Pre-Internet, I had almost no awareness of anyone outside the U.S., although I had been told the dim outlines of the family immigration story, and I didn’t know any relatives more distant that first cousins and grandparents except for a couple of great-aunts and one or two of my dad’s first cousins in his generation. I’m a lousy correspondent via snail mail, and I’m sure that that didn’t help.
Post-Internet, I am familiar with the daily lives of many third and fourth cousins who I didn’t know existed growing up (and a host of more recently acquired cousins in law and step-relations), including several who live abroad. I am also far more aware of what is going on in the lives of friends and acquaintances I’ve made from elementary school through college, some of whom live abroad and are outside my ordinary social circle. The Internet has also facilitated in person visits in both the U.S. and Europe with some of my relatives in Finland and Germany, although I’ve been unfortunate and missed out on the European meet ups.
For example, when a mathematician whom I know exclusively through the Internet who lives in Christchurch, New Zealand, appeared to be entering a mental health crisis, I was able to contact a friend from high school in Ohio, and another friend whom I met while I was living in New Zealand for a year, both of whom live tolerably nearby, to attempt to organize an intervention or welfare check. (As it happened, the situation resolved itself a few hours before those steps would have been taken.)
There are probably a dozen people I’ve met over the Internet and never met in person that I regularly communicate with and with whom I have some awareness of what is going on in their lives, all over the world.
I’m at least dimly aware of what is currently going on in the lives of almost everyone I’ve ever dated or even had a crush on, ever, even though they have spread to the four winds and I haven’t seen some of them in person for a couple of decades. I recently sent flowers to a college friend who just got tenure.
For me, the combination of the ease with which one can find contact information for someone and the negligible cost of making intercontinental contact have both been important.
There may be limits to how much you can inflate Dunbar’s number, but the Internet does allow you to deepen your relationship with those people to levels comparable to what would have been present in ancient Neolithic villages or Paleolithic bands, at immense distances. It has also strengthened greatly the amount of awareness I have of what is going on with people in different generations (both down to people about my children’s age and up to people in my parents’ generation.)
But I too have had a very different experience in terms of relationships and friendships. That doesnt mean my experience is the modal experience, but I definitely got in touch with a much more diverse cast of characters via the internet (and probably became more anti-social within the physical community I live in). Some of it is just old friends and family, so I am in touch with many old friends and acquaintances whose lives I was not in touch with in the pre-internet era (and being over 50, I can compare to some extent). And the same for extended family: I am much more in touch with extended family scattered widely around the world, not just (or even mostly) in the US. But even those contacts include intensified relationships that were not always that close in the time we were together physicially. Things changed, and thanks to the internet, we could discover and coordinate that change.
I think my experience may be more typical of older immigrants who grew up in other countries and have wide international circles (given the way emigrants radiated out from the Indian subcontinent) with whom we would have lost touch after migration in the good old days.. or this may be personality specific. But I do think it has made a difference, beyond just amplifying existing trends (for example, I had a few local Indian friends wherever I moved, but never the variety and number I have via the internet...it's not just that the number and variety of locations is greater, it's also the ability to pick out those you share interests with, which was always far more limited in the past when physical contact was whatever it happened to be).
The Dunbar number may not have increased much, but it's cast of characters has definitely changed in my case.Replies: @Ali
I am a scientist. Most of my colleagues and classmates through the years are now constantly moving around the world, including myself.
Through the internet, I can reasonably keep in touch with people and often do not even think about where they physically are.
When I visit somewhere, in 30 minutes I can arrange to meet up with people I haven’t seen in a decade. Often neither of us even live there and just happen to be in the same place, which I saw on Facebook, or they saw on Facebook.
It is definitely different than just amplifying trends that existed. If I had to call people on the phone or send letters, I would never see most of these people ever again, or know if they were even alive.
there are a lot of people who spent a lot of their time playing online games or otherwise taking part in internet communities. Those internet communities are mostly international. So people who do this actually have transcended the traditional social borders.
Social networks of various types (colleagues, family, friends) haven’t changed much in nature.
However, Internet didn’t just make communication easy, it chiefly democratized one-to-many communications. It started with targeted mailing list, then Usenet newgroups, then WWW forums, then dedicated social networking suites. All of these things have in common the fact that the random individual has the capacity to express itself to multiple persons. That capacity didn’t really exist prior to that; the only way you would express yourself to multiple persons was to be there or use the rather expensive method of publication which was heavily gated by editors (due to its price).
I consider “social network sites” to be actually a step back in term of “Internet revolution”. What they do is make easier existing social networks, or facilitate self-promotion. But the main capacity of old-school Internet applications was that you would express yourself to people you absolutely had no idea existed, and could start a dialogue; draw them into one of your social networks. And their location would not be irrelevant, it just wasn’t determinant.
I always thought it was for giggly teenage girls, so I am frequently astounded to find that reasonably intelligent adults use it. Does it really add real value to friendships? Also, what about privacy concerns?Replies: @Numinous
The thing about Facebook is that you can use it for whatever you please. You can use it for self promotion or gossip, or you can use it as your personal blog and have long comment threads (like you do on Unz.com). I am not sure Facebook facilitates friendships in any meaningful way, but it lets you keep in touch with a geographically dispersed friends circle for much longer than you would have back in the day. On the flip-side, Facebook can cause non-trivial damage to existing friendships; I see a lot of preening, and those who are not inclined to publish every detail of their lives might get depressed or envious of their friend’s constant streams of “achievements”.
Regarding privacy, you can choose to keep your posts among friends or open to the public. But you have no control over what your friends and family publish, and whether they choose to keep their content (which includes details and pictures about you) private or public. In fact, you don’t even have to possess a Facebook account to lose your privacy; as long as someone you know has an account and is publishing authentic information about you, you lose privacy. The ability to share content easily is part of the DNA of Facebook, so this problem just can’t be fixed in my opinion.
I still don't understand how one can make or maintain friendships via a social media site. To me real friendship requires the kind of bond-building that comes from activities such as sharing intimacy, enduring hardship, and doing things together in close proximity. For my wife and me, some of our closest friends are people with whom we raise and educate our children together, some of our neighbors and fellow parishioners, men with whom I worked together overseas and their families, my training partners, and my hunting buddies with whom I meet once in a while, shoot a copious number of animals or birds and then drink together around a bonfire telling tall tales. I just can't see how, instead, friendship can be cultivated exchanging posts and photos on Facebook.
The whole social media thing is truly an aspect of the Internet I just don't get.Replies: @Anthony
This is true, but I think Facebook and similar media have helped geographically dispersed friendships remain alive for much longer than they would have before the Internet. This is meaningful to someone who has spent significant amounts of time in different countries, and consequently created ties in all those countries. Friendships that depended on snail mail, and involved not seeing each others’ faces for years, were unlikely to survive very long. What Facebook cannot do (as I think you observe) is create string friendships out of thin air or weak connections (like you and your cousin.)
I am not sure it has increased “internationalism”. For example, i don’t think it has (at least till now) changed or diluted national loyalties or lessened sectarian divides (even though international shouting matches have become more possible, I dont think it has made things worse either, maybe a little better, if only a little).
But I too have had a very different experience in terms of relationships and friendships. That doesnt mean my experience is the modal experience, but I definitely got in touch with a much more diverse cast of characters via the internet (and probably became more anti-social within the physical community I live in). Some of it is just old friends and family, so I am in touch with many old friends and acquaintances whose lives I was not in touch with in the pre-internet era (and being over 50, I can compare to some extent). And the same for extended family: I am much more in touch with extended family scattered widely around the world, not just (or even mostly) in the US. But even those contacts include intensified relationships that were not always that close in the time we were together physicially. Things changed, and thanks to the internet, we could discover and coordinate that change.
I think my experience may be more typical of older immigrants who grew up in other countries and have wide international circles (given the way emigrants radiated out from the Indian subcontinent) with whom we would have lost touch after migration in the good old days.. or this may be personality specific. But I do think it has made a difference, beyond just amplifying existing trends (for example, I had a few local Indian friends wherever I moved, but never the variety and number I have via the internet…it’s not just that the number and variety of locations is greater, it’s also the ability to pick out those you share interests with, which was always far more limited in the past when physical contact was whatever it happened to be).
The Dunbar number may not have increased much, but it’s cast of characters has definitely changed in my case.
Great example, and it underscores what we already know – that every person, and even every stage in a person’s life, is different. Some become eager to connect with the distant family and tenthe Internet helps; others may be into professional networking and out of the childhood extended-family, old-country phases; still others are driven by hobbies and interests which define their new circles… It may be more about our developing paths in lives than about gadgets and websites?
To me the most fascinating parts is where the social networking disconnects people instead of connecting them. I think predominantly in two ways: nice people who are out of the networks, or use them too infrequently, drop out when we find ourselves wedded to the continuous flow of small tidbits of near-real time updates … so when someone posts, instead, once in a blue moon, an album with 300 pictures of a yesteryear vacation, then it’s almost as if it didn’t happen. The connection is lost. Another way of losing it is on the opposite side of the real-timeliness, update-volume spectrum … when someone otherwise nice and friendly has a constant stream of irritating updates or, worse, unwelcome comments … and you’d like, why couldn’t they just stick to a beach picture and a birthday note once in a while, and keep the rest of it private?
The Internet is like steroids to building social capital, but the real-world span and tone of those links is shaped by the real-world cultural and ideological capital that shapes it.
In terms of forging new types of relationships, there is a qualitative difference between asynchronous online/offline communication, live voice or video, and actually meeting in the meatspace. Dunbar number is different for each level or orbit of reality, communication & affinity – not just in terms of space but also time. I think its possible for a human to relate with practically all others – just not at the same ‘distance’.
The tone of inter-group communication is largely a choice made by individuals. Expanding the group of online contacts does modulate communication depending on conflict-cooperation parameters set by preexisting real-world group dynamics. If an individual wants to, he or she can break out of those real-world parameters. Depends on psychological and environmental conditions – e.g., women generally tend to be naturally exogamous given greater self-determinism.
I used to tell non-techie people that “the Internet helps connect people (of similar hobbies or interests) that ordinarily would never find each other”. I think this was very true in the era of Listservs, USENET, later PHP-BB forums for every conceivable topic, and later still the comments sections of popular blogs. A lot of that activity has since moved to Twitter and special-interest FB groups, not necessarily for the better IMO.
FB itself is a bit of a strange beast. Great for keeping in touch with former classmates and colleagues, seeing what they’re up to, seeing pictures of their kids. In that case it takes the place of the “annual Christmas letter”. I’m not sure it’s quite as a good as a forum for discussion or debate — it is a bit too one-stop shop — like an unholy mix of business and pleasure.
Twitter is something I still struggle with. I know a lot of people love it, but I find it far too ephemeral, the signal-to-noise ratio so low that one’s senses become overloaded. I only really use it for things that are not available elsewhere (public-transit system notifications and interesting people with no other online presence) Perhaps I’m just “doing it wrong”.
The word “internationalism” was part of components for socialism/communism, which is opposite of nationalism. To capitalism, the word means globolization. Certainly business people love globolization which creates broader market, growth of business and higher profit. So you can see why both left and right are against tribal nationalism which only benefit tribal underclass.
Politics aside. Internet is major one of many components faciliting globolization/internationalism for both good and bad. Other components include containers shipping, high speed train, EU/NAFTA, ect.
Good: speeding up commerce, knowlege spread, idea exchange, outsource business, ect
Bad: globalized terrorist /criminal organization(ISIS, al qaeda), nigeria scam artists, offshore tax shelter, ect.
Marx was right on this. Once the techs are available for globolization, no one can turn it back (which is against any one conscious effort to stop it).
My conclusion is yes, it matters. I am using wechat forming social connection with my classmates and relatives around world since both my relatives and classmates are distributed all over world. I do not have facebook account though.
It may be that you were born to early. My daughter probably will be able to keep in touch with her nursery friends forever, as I have their parent details on email. I only remember the first name of one guy…
It is also growing wider and deeper exponentially, especially thanks to constant improvements such as smartphones and 4G. The other day, I was walking through a park in London with my daughter, while my mom in Spain watched and interacted with us through Skype. It really felt like she was there.
My wife has a WhatsApp group with her college friends, they chat and gossip everyday from different countries.
But the biggest change is at work. Used to be that you worked with people in a room, and when you left you would never see most of them again. Now you work with people all over the world, and keep in touch easily with anyone you like, arrange nights out with the while bunch…
Thanks to the Internet (and specifically Reddit) I regularly talk Israeli politics with Israelis, Scottish politics with Scots, Tunisian politics with Tunisians, and so on. So it’s relevant for me at least. And on the gaming side about half the people I game with are Australian. (I’m Canadian). I suspect that gaming general would be a big crossroads of many nations.
But I too have had a very different experience in terms of relationships and friendships. That doesnt mean my experience is the modal experience, but I definitely got in touch with a much more diverse cast of characters via the internet (and probably became more anti-social within the physical community I live in). Some of it is just old friends and family, so I am in touch with many old friends and acquaintances whose lives I was not in touch with in the pre-internet era (and being over 50, I can compare to some extent). And the same for extended family: I am much more in touch with extended family scattered widely around the world, not just (or even mostly) in the US. But even those contacts include intensified relationships that were not always that close in the time we were together physicially. Things changed, and thanks to the internet, we could discover and coordinate that change.
I think my experience may be more typical of older immigrants who grew up in other countries and have wide international circles (given the way emigrants radiated out from the Indian subcontinent) with whom we would have lost touch after migration in the good old days.. or this may be personality specific. But I do think it has made a difference, beyond just amplifying existing trends (for example, I had a few local Indian friends wherever I moved, but never the variety and number I have via the internet...it's not just that the number and variety of locations is greater, it's also the ability to pick out those you share interests with, which was always far more limited in the past when physical contact was whatever it happened to be).
The Dunbar number may not have increased much, but it's cast of characters has definitely changed in my case.Replies: @Ali
I think we may need a new concept: The “effective Dunbar number”, based on a time-varying field of social attention.
This is an extremely interesting topic that’s hard to address in a brief comment. All I’ll say is that I have been on the Internet for 30 years, and it has truly been a central factor in making me who I am. On the narrower issue of internationalization too, I think it made an incredible difference, though it certainly did not make location irrelevant.
When I check the people I most commonly interact with on facebook as of fall 2015 I find:
Utah: 5
Hawaii: 4
Washington DC: 3
Chicago: 3
Minneapolis: 2
Hong Kong: 1
Beijing: 1
Taipei: 1
Nagoya: 1
San Diego: 1
Berlin: 1
Seattle: 1
Boston: 1
Denver: 1
The nationalities of this group include one Korean, one Filipino, one Taiwanese, one Hong Konger, two mainland Chinese. There are a few American-Indians and ABCs on this list, and some don’t have citizenship, but they grew up in the USA so I count them as American.
So its possible to have fairly constant contact with people from all over the map, including steady international contacts. But my personal history is interesting (I’ve never lived in a place longer than 4 years, have lived internationally, attended a university that was 60% foreign, and
served as a missionary with foreigners) so its not representative. Indeed, if you look at all my friends it confirms the point. I have not done a detailed breakdown of my friend yet, but of the 479 friends I have on facebook about 250 are not American. So in the friend group I interact with on a consistent basis, Americans are heavily over-represented.
Regarding privacy, you can choose to keep your posts among friends or open to the public. But you have no control over what your friends and family publish, and whether they choose to keep their content (which includes details and pictures about you) private or public. In fact, you don't even have to possess a Facebook account to lose your privacy; as long as someone you know has an account and is publishing authentic information about you, you lose privacy. The ability to share content easily is part of the DNA of Facebook, so this problem just can't be fixed in my opinion.Replies: @Twinkie
I really don’t get it. What does Facebook do that regular e-mail, letters, and airline/car travel cannot accomplish?
I understand that much, but my privacy concern is more about what *Facebook* would do with the ostensibly “kept among friends” data. It doesn’t strike me as a particularly ethnically-run corporation, and I’d be concerned about how the company uses that semi-private information.
I still don’t understand how one can make or maintain friendships via a social media site. To me real friendship requires the kind of bond-building that comes from activities such as sharing intimacy, enduring hardship, and doing things together in close proximity. For my wife and me, some of our closest friends are people with whom we raise and educate our children together, some of our neighbors and fellow parishioners, men with whom I worked together overseas and their families, my training partners, and my hunting buddies with whom I meet once in a while, shoot a copious number of animals or birds and then drink together around a bonfire telling tall tales. I just can’t see how, instead, friendship can be cultivated exchanging posts and photos on Facebook.
The whole social media thing is truly an aspect of the Internet I just don’t get.
I agree that it's hard to create relationships via the internet, though it does make it easier to find people who have common interests. But the internet, and Facebook in particular, makes it easier to maintain existing relationships. When my friends who've moved to Texas for work come visit, I already know some of what they've been doing, and the conversations can start at a somewhat deeper level.
There are different levels of friendship in real life, and while the closest ones really do require lots of shared time together, the not quite as close ones don't as much. Social media works best for the latter.
I still don't understand how one can make or maintain friendships via a social media site. To me real friendship requires the kind of bond-building that comes from activities such as sharing intimacy, enduring hardship, and doing things together in close proximity. For my wife and me, some of our closest friends are people with whom we raise and educate our children together, some of our neighbors and fellow parishioners, men with whom I worked together overseas and their families, my training partners, and my hunting buddies with whom I meet once in a while, shoot a copious number of animals or birds and then drink together around a bonfire telling tall tales. I just can't see how, instead, friendship can be cultivated exchanging posts and photos on Facebook.
The whole social media thing is truly an aspect of the Internet I just don't get.Replies: @Anthony
Facebook makes it easier than email., especially for one-to-many communication. A friend who lives in another state can post about an event they went to, and those friends who care about that event can read more or go thorough the photos or comment, while those who don’t care about that kind of event can skim past and wait for the friend to post something about an interest they do share.
I agree that it’s hard to create relationships via the internet, though it does make it easier to find people who have common interests. But the internet, and Facebook in particular, makes it easier to maintain existing relationships. When my friends who’ve moved to Texas for work come visit, I already know some of what they’ve been doing, and the conversations can start at a somewhat deeper level.
There are different levels of friendship in real life, and while the closest ones really do require lots of shared time together, the not quite as close ones don’t as much. Social media works best for the latter.