Not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives

From Primates on Facebook. The cost of information acquisition.

That Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks will increase the size of human social groups is an obvious hypothesis, given that they reduce a lot of the friction and cost involved in keeping in touch with other people. Once you join and gather your “friends” online, you can share in their lives as recorded by photographs, “status updates” and other titbits, and, with your permission, they can share in yours. Additional friends are free, so why not say the more the merrier?

But perhaps additional friends are not free. Primatologists call at least some of the things that happen on social networks “grooming”. In the wild, grooming is time-consuming and here computerisation certainly helps. But keeping track of who to groom—and why—demands quite a bit of mental computation. You need to remember who is allied with, hostile to, or lusts after whom, and act accordingly.

Not to be too utilitarian, but the social network you cultivate and invest time in does have consequences. There are those close to you (you invest more time in them) and there are those further from your life (you invest less time in them). If you get the two confused, cultivating the distant and the inconsequential versus the near and important, as I am afraid probably does happen with some frequency, there is trouble soon to come.

What mainly goes up, therefore, is not the core network but the number of casual contacts that people track more passively. This corroborates Dr Marsden's ideas about core networks, since even those Facebook users with the most friends communicate only with a relatively small number of them.

Put differently, people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren't necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a polling organisation. Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.

We are all limited by the time we have. Where (and with whom) we invest that time says a lot about us and our priorities. And sometimes what it says is not pleasing. To put it in contemporary terms: From Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."