Why the Internet Wont Get You Any More Friends

The internet and its social networking site derivatives such as Facebook were sold to us on the promise of widening our social horizons. The internet offers us the implicit opportunity to make casual acquaintances with people all around the world, and so widen our social horizons. I shall argue that this promissory note was made without consulting the humans at the centre of it all. In fact, although the internet does solve some problems of social interaction, it does not, and cannot, cut through the glass ceiling that limits the number of relationships we can have, now known as Dunbar’s Number. This limit on the number of friendships we can maintain is a consequence partly of cognitive constraints in the human brain and partly a consequence of time constraints (in a context where relationships require the investment of time spent with the friend). However, we can still ask whether, given these constraints, the digital world might yet allow us to increase the size of our social communities by other means, and I will speculate on some of these (in particular, the role of virtual touch)