How many friends do you have? In the pre-Facebook days most people didn’t count their friends. We knew there were some special friends we could always depend on, and a much larger group that we we were acquainted with and perhaps spent time with occasionally. They might be people we met through our work or through various community organizations.

The advent of social media, however, has led to researchers asking, “What’s a friend?” There’s a debate whether connections maintained online in Facebook can have the same “value” as those maintained through face-to-face interactions. If 1,500 people are connected to you on Facebook, does that mean you have 1,500 friends?

Dunbar’s Number

Community, friendship, supporting and caring are top of mind with us at Flower. We believe that communication technologies are powerful tools for staying connected. As we considered how to design Flower to effectively support friends and family, we remembered “Dunbar’s Number”: the recognition that most humans tend to belong to communities of about 150 people.

Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary anthropology at University of Oxford, was interviewed for NPR’s All Things Considered, and talked about his research for their podcast. It’s worth a listen.

When discussing large Facebook networks, Dunbar points out the problem that “relationships involved across very big units then become very casual — and don’t have that deep meaning and sense of obligation and reciprocity that you have with your close friends.”

And what of the element of time? Do we give up something important when we spend time with a wide circle of Facebook friends rather than focusing on a much smaller circle in the physical world? What will be the affect of growing up with virtual relationships that are meant to be similar to physical ones? How will this change the way we interact and the number of close relationships we have?

The Impact of Social Media

In the October 7, 2014 issue of The New Yorker, Maria Konnikova discusses these questions, also in the context of the Dunbar Number.

With social media, we can easily keep up with the lives and interests of far more than a hundred and fifty people. But without investing the face-to-face time, we lack deeper connections to them, and the time we invest in superficial relationships comes at the expense of more profound ones.

Konnikova suggests that the power of shared experience is critical to building long-lasting relationships and to our understanding of social interactions. We are designing Flower to make it easy for you to share the experience of supporting the people you care about. With Flower, you can join with Co-Creators and make a difference in someone’s life. Unlike many social networks, Flower will help you invest your time and energy to strengthen your friendships and develop deeper connections within your own support network.

Let’s make digital media work for our benefit!