Life and Religion

The truth is, I don’t know LaWanda Harrington Hamilton Whitted. But just this week I accepted her as a friend on Facebook.

 I really wanted to send a message to see how we knew each other, but I didn’t want to risk possibly offending a distant cousin.

Accepting friend requests from people I do not know personally was part of my New Year’s resolution, at the nudge of my 14-year-old niece, Lenora. She saw that my Facebook page had 30-something friend requests.

She insisted I accept them as a friend or click “Ignore,” to which I replied, “I didn’t want to hurt their feelings by not accepting.” And that got me to thinking.
The primary reason I’m on Facebook – besides being hip, of course – is to network. Networking means meeting and exchanging ideas and thoughts with people outside of my circle. So on Jan. 1, I accepted all of those friend requests.

Some of my friends only accept requests from real friends or acquaintances. Other friends of mine aren’t as picky. They will accept a request from a donkey because for them, it’s all about reaching a goal: 2,000 friends and counting. Yeah, baby!

A study re-released by Robin Dunbar of Oxford University says any social circle that includes more than 150 people is not genuine. The study says that the human brain’s neocortex can only “comprehend social circles of 150 before cohesion gives out.”

He recently revived his study to put Facebook to the test and concluded that 150 is still the magic number. Using a female test subject who had 500 friends on Facebook, Dunbar had her friends organized alphabetically and assigned each a number. Then at random, he chose 50 numbers and asked her these three questions about each friend: What is this person’s relation to you? When was the last time you spoke? Why are you friends?

Out of the test pool of 50, 31 proved not to be the test subject’s friends. I think this experiment would be worth our time since allowing people as friends gives them a glimpse into our world, and because some human resources departments admit they look at Facebook pages when deciding on job applicants. Could we be guilty by social network “friend” associations?

Facebook should give us a choice to designate our friend requests into different categories: Real Friends; Acquaintances; People We Should Know; and People Whose Feelings We Don’t Want to Hurt by Ignoring Their Friend Request.

If they don’t fall into one of these categories, click Ignore.

E-mail columnist Kimberly Harrington at onyxlyspeaking@yahoo.com.

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