I know I needn’t complain about things I needn’t subject myself to, but I notice a large number of people - on LiveJournal, MySpace, all the social-networking sites - tend to collect ‘friends’ numbering in the 100s… If you use your journal/site to advertise your music/work I can see this, as it allows you to individualize your advertising and be better at ‘direct marketing’. But I doubt this many people are actually advertising their shows or art with their weblog/site. Rather, as someone mentioned in my previous post, it seems like a popularity contest.
I don’t really care much for popularity - I’ve never been very popular, and I doubt I ever will. The key for me is that I only have so much room for ‘friends’ - meaning people I want to interact with either in person or online.
The Economist had an article about evolution in their Xmas issue, which alluded to the idea that in ‘real life’, humans tend to aggregate into bands of about 150, even in our post-hunter-gatherer world. We tend to lose touch with distant relatives if we have a large immediate family, and lose track of old friends when we make new ones. In most cases, I tend to scoff at arguments for the hard-wiredness of human behavior. What I do agree with, however, is that the scope of a human’s ability to remember faces and quickly recall data about a person’s character and history is limited.
Technology has widened the scope of our ability to maintain contact with distant people, and better-enabled us to communicate and forge bonds with people we would otherwise not know at all. However, it does little in the way of help us better manage the masses of personal information we are inherently capable of managing.
I’ve got several dozen friends and family that are not online, and if you add in the people who have websites outside of the social networking sites, I’d say there is room for 75-100 interesting souls that I could keep up with and genuinely care about knowing. That’s why I tend to revise my contact lists often - when I find new people I want to keep up on, I have to decide whether I want to keep up with them more than the more marginal members of my existing list.
This is why when I see someone who is not a DJ/musician/artist/shopkeeper who has like 1000 people in their ‘friends’ list, I simply wonder ‘why?’.