In Robin Dunbar’s TED Talk “Can the internet buy you more friends?” Dunbar questions whether the internet can actually enlarge one’s circle of friends beyond what he calls their “local village.” He argues that the internet does not actually do so, despite what some may think.

He shows this by providing the audience with Facebook’s own data on its users’ average number of friends. Despite Facebook giving its users the ability to have thousands of friends on the platform, it turns out that most users only have around 120-130 friends. Although those on Facebook may be adding more friends, they tend to spend most of their time only talking to a few of them at most. Dunbar continues by explaining that this is due to humans’ cognitive limit on the number of friends we can maintain a relationship with. In fact, this range of friendships able to be maintained is very consistent with predicted group sizes for humans throughout time and within different human social groups. For example, Dunbar shows that Neolithic villages in 6500 BC had a predicted group size of 150-200 and 18th century English villages had a predicted group size of about 160. As I mentioned earlier, the reason for this number has to do with the size of our brains. Time investment is additionally another important factor when thinking about the number of friends we have. While we may have a small average number of close friends, the quality of those friendships is very strong. 

When speaking about these trends in our friendships, Dunbar says that female friendships grow stronger when speaking with each other, while male friendships do so when spending time together. This being said, rather than Facebook or other social media platforms being the source for building stronger friendships, platforms such as Facetime or Skype do the job much better. This all has to do with laughter, when we laugh together endorphins are released. Overall, these types of immediate reactions from these types of technology help users create better friendships than they would on other platforms. I wonder, however, if these types of platforms can also, perhaps, exhaust relationships as well, depending on how much they are used. Could it both strengthen and hinder relationships simultaneously?