"Friends must have eaten salt together"

[tobyhush]

An interesting article from the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7920434.stm
It has some interesting comments about numbers and qualities of friends. I'm mostly posting it to stir up trouble though I suppose it's less likely to do so on LJ than on Facebook or something like that.

"The average number is about 150, says leading anthropologist

Comments

[syrensix]

This totally makes sense to me.
Why would this stir up trouble?

[tobyhush]

my thought was that people who truly believe in social media would be upset by the notion that they don't have 1000+ friends or that the many people that you(generic) only interact via facebook/livejournal/twitter aren't real friends.

[thewronghands]

Eh. I do think that some people that I interact with on LJ and not in real life really are my friends. (Not everyone, clearly. But there are a few that I feel I've really gotten to know through the medium, and that's a valid friendship to me.) But I'm not upset by the idea that people in general might disagree; I'd only be upset if I thought I was close to someone and they didn't think so.

[syrensix]

I think people identify "close" as being different things, as well, which is what makes this kind of discussion ripe for mis-understanding.

I don't really think that these concepts can be clearly lined up (or out) because each person feels them differently. Its like the pain scale - a 2 to me might be a 5 to you, or swapped.