No matter how many Facebook friends you amass, your real-life circle of close mates has a max capacity:
A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that humans have, almost uniformly, a “one-in-one-out” policy—every time you become close to a new person, someone else subconsciously gets the boot. “Although social communication is now easier than ever, it seems that our capacity for maintaining emotionally close relationships is finite,” said Felix Reed-Tsochas, a researcher at Oxford University and an author of the study. “While the number varies from person to person, what holds true in all cases is that at any point individuals are able to keep up close relationships with only a small number of people, so that new friendships come at the expense of ‘relegating’ existing friends.”
Emily Badger adds:
[I]f that’s the case, then advances in communication technology that were supposed to be revolutionizing our social networks probably aren’t doing that after all.
The ease of communication enabled by cell phones doesn’t necessarily allow you to grow closer to more people. And that guy you know who has 1,000 friends on Facebook? “It isn’t exactly that the computer has just done some amazing transformation of what humans are capable of doing socially, and that person now genuinely has 1,000 bosom-buddy friends,” says Reed-Tsochas. Most of those people are from the outer layers of the onion. Facebook (or Twitter or email) has certainly made it easier to stay in touch with these far-flung acquaintances, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed the number or depth of your relationships with the people closest to you. Modern communication tools were also supposedly going to eliminate the importance of “distance” in our lives, and we’ve repeatedly seen evidence that this isn’t true. This same technology is changing our world and how we interact with each other in many ways, but perhaps not quite so fundamentally as to alter our inherent “social signatures.”
The Dish 