介绍:
LW: You probably have a lot of friends on Facebook, WeChat or other social media platforms. But how many of them can you actually count as your close friends? Now Brian, I’m guilty of this as well. There’s people on there who are probably my friends, and there’s probably also people on there who I’ve not really met, and I wouldn’t be able to tell their faces if I had to see them in real life. So what exactly is the science behind this?
BK: Exactly. That’s the key thing there – the difference between real friends, whatever you want to call that and other Facebook friends. There’s this guy, Robin Dunbar, who studies friends, and he’s just done a study recently saying that most of your friends on Facebook are not friends in real life. So, in the study, the average person had about 150 Facebook friends, but only 14 of them would actually express any sympathy, say they’re sorry to hear that if something bad happened to you. And if you were in a really serious situation, only about four of your friends on Facebook would actually come to help.
LW: So how many friends would you have to begin with? Or friends friends?
BK: Friends friends? Well that’s the thing…
LW: No, I mean like, let’s say the study says 14 of them. So how big was the sample size?
BK: So – they had about 2,000 people, with the average person having about 150 friends on Facebook.
LW: OK. It’s a lot of people. Wu You, what do you make of this?
WY: I think first of all, people make wrong expectation of Facebook friends. Because Facebook, it is about a virtual world. It is after all your internet friends on it.
LW: If you really take a hard look, and you’re brutally honest with yourself, a lot of the people on there, they don’t really know you, care about you in that way. If I’m not mistaken, when you run your timeline, it has different settings in terms of, you have your close friends, and then that’s a level beyond that, where it goes acquaintances, and then there’s, quite vaguely, people you know. Like that’s the third level [BK: Right], the third level of that. So even then, if you are the kind of person who – you take your friendship really seriously, what you can do is you can change your privacy settings, and you know, you wouldn’t see all those things, and you’d like have the connectivity of it, but you wouldn’t have any sort of expectations of intimacy.
WY: What matters is just people need[s] to know what they want out of this. Rarely, people will count how many friends they have on Facebook or on social media like WeChat. They just know this is a virtual world. But if they want to have real friends, go to call them, go to contact them, go to meet them, have these face to face interactions. So if people really know what they want out of this, there won’t be all those kind of cynical communities.
LW: Right, Wu You. This is the other thing though. In China, people don’t tend to use Facebook - WeChat. [WY: Yes, WeChat] Alright, now. But what I’m interested in is if we take this same study and we apply it to WeChat, we see exactly how many friendships you actually maintain. But there you go. So, at the same time, you know, you don’t have a lot of your friends on there, a lot of your good friends on WeChat. Would you agree?
WY: I agree. Because that is simply social media platform. They are the same. [LW: OK] They are all the same social media. To link with other people [LW: OK], to communicate with other people. [LW: Yes] That’s it. [LW: Alright] So don’t expect too much, and don’t be too cynical of it.
BK: What I have seen is where people will send out a message just checking to see if other people - if you’ve cleared them from your friends list. People will sometimes, like, kind of go through their friends, and kind of clean out people who, like we’re talking about, they’re not really friends with, they haven’t like ever exchanged a message with or whatever. And so they’ll go through, they’ll delete those people, and then you’ll get these messages, sending them just to see, OK, which ones bounce – which ones of these bounce back, who has actually deleted me, who’s still my friend on there.
WY: I think that’s really boring…
LW: That’s really sad.
BK: Have you guys not seen those?
LW:…really sad.
BK: I’ve seen those once or twice. [WY: Wow.] Just like, checking, alright, have you deleted me, like, just seeing…
WY: I don’t think that is really necessary. If people really need this kind of procedure to find out who has deleted me, I think they have too much leisure time.
