I usually try to be on the cusp of trends. I joined eBay in 1998 and Napster in Fall 1999. For some reason, it seemed for a time like too much work to set up Friendster, but last night I got around to doing it. (I was quite overstimulated by a great idea by Kenji and finishing The Goblet of Fire, so my energy level was high.) I’m glad I did, as I do feel occasional pangs of guilt for turning my back from my high school friends. I’m sure that Friendster will help me get back into some level of contact with them. Not that I’m actively looking to rekindle long past friendships, but I’d love to at least know who’s in the area.
This Connected Selves post examines a biological charge that human beings are mentally unable to mainain more than a certain amount of close friendships. I’ve been known to point to size discrepancy for why fraternities and sororities are so different (gender differences being obviously big, too). Frats (at W&M at least) tend to be smaller, allowing for greater social interaction between all the members. Everyone has their closest group of friends, but most are entirely comfortable with any other member in the group. I think because of this you’ll also find frat guys to have fewer friends with non-members that sorority girls. Sororities go for a bigger pool, and you can see that they’re not able to maintain close friendships with all of them. It just isn’t possible to be close friends with more than a handul of people, and lesser friends with more than a few dozen.
This post on Plastic Bag discusses the first one, bringing up that Friendster and the web may be able to begin to overcome that. Online communities allow a level of casual intimacy that people wouldn’t otherwise maintain. How often would I email Whitehead if he didn’t have a webpage? But since he does, I can check in on it every few weeks, read what he’s posted, and remember the guy. Likewise, by leaving comments on your friends’ pages, you can keep up a dialogue, however mundane, that keeps a friendship burning just enough.
Update: Here’s another post on the issue, and here’s the paper by Robin Dunbar, “Co-Evolution of Neocoretx Size, Group Size and Language in Humans”.