Friends
Friends
Sunday, 6 June 2010
The end-of-term farewells are perhaps the most emotionally draining times of the College’s annual cycle. The examinations have finished, and our students suddenly realise that it will a very long time – if ever – before they again see some of their friends with whom they have shared classes, meals, activities, rooms, fun, heartbreak, stress, trips, and indeed life itself. The seemingly endless hugs, the tears, and the screams of those grief-stricken final departures are not easily forgotten by anyone who has experienced them.
When I conduct enrolment interviews, one of the anxieties that is often expressed by potential new students is whether they will be able to make friends or not. It is perhaps an understandable anxiety, representing a simple fear of the unknown, but it is an anxiety that seldom lasts more than 40 or 50 seconds after arriving as a new student.
It’s true - friendships can often be complex. One of my favourite comedies on television is ‘The Big Bang Theory’, which traces the experiences for four highly intelligent but socially inept ‘geeks’. In one episode, Sheldon, who is the most hyper-intelligent and socially inept of them all, wants to make a new friend.
In this clip, Sheldon creates a friendship flowchart to describe the algorithm which he believed made it inevitable that he would make friends. The flowchart looked like this:
Unfortunately, in the video clip, he got to the ‘Do I share that interest?’ decision diamond and found himself in an infinite loop because he didn’t like any of the things his potential new friend was suggesting. Fortunately, one of his friends, Howard Wolowitz, modified the diagram by adding a loop counter and a ‘Least Objectionable Activity’ (LOA) option that enabled Sheldon to break out into a conclusion. Howard’s flowchart looked like this:
Now that our students have dispersed for the summer break, the intimacy of personal friendships will inevitably be replaced by Facebook friendships. Facebook can be a great way to maintain contact (except if you live in Mainland China of course), but I was intrigued by a recent article in ‘The New York Times’ and the ‘International Herald Tribune’ which cited the British anthropologist and Oxford professor Robin Dunbar who has done some interesting research in this area. Dunbar has proposed a theory that the number of individuals with whom a stable interpersonal relationship can be maintained (read: ‘friends’) is limited by the size of the human brain, and specifically the neocortex. “Dunbar’s number,” as this hypothesis has become known, is 150.
Facebook seems to disagree. It has placed a limit of 5,000 friends on each Facebook account, which seems more than generous if Robin Dunbar’s research is to be believed.
The recent ‘Ban Facebook Day’ was a reminder that virtual friends are often a poor substitute for real living friends. Social workers and psychologists have been warning of the dangers of social networking ever since the phenomenon began. My good friend and colleague, Dr Michael Carr-Gregg, is one such adolescent psychologist who has recently written that parents and schools need to educate teenagers away from their naïve trust towards an understanding of the unrelentingly public nature of the internet.
Dr Carr-Gregg argues that adolescents are much less discriminating when it comes to accepting ‘friends’ online who they may not even know. He also claims that most adolescents are unaware how easily they can be identified through their online photographs and comments.
Rather than repeat his words, I refer you to an article in ‘The Age’ that explains the dangers of social networking in terms of the stages of adolescent brain development. If you have trouble accessing the article using the link above because of firewall settings, it can also be read HERE.
I am not anti-Facebook or anti-social networking, and I am certainly not anti-friendships! I have a Facebook account myself that I use to keep in touch with my children, my former students and former colleagues. And I manage to achieve this with considerably fewer than 5,000 ‘friends’ (my total count, as at today, is 343 ‘Facebook Friends’). Nonetheless, I do worry when I see the way that many young people post personal information for public viewing, apparently with littler understanding of the possible consequences of poorly set privacy settings.
Sheldon’s friendship algorithm might seem funny, but he was actually taking more care and control of his friendships than most people do online.