[rayiner]

> I use a combination of Google Hangouts, email, and just plain old phone calls to keep up to date with their lives. I share photos daily, via google photos, directly to those that I want to see them. And my family, who happen to use Facebook, know to send me photos using other methods.

This seems like an inconvenience you impose on everyone else to do things Facebook handles natively.

[bitexploder]

I have learned I just don't need to live social life with distant relatives and friends every day. The important things filter to the surface of your life as do the important people. I get more value out of a longer email or a 15 minute phone call than a bunch of shallow interactions on Facebook.

I suspect over time we will learn that Facebook and the like is actually poor at maintaining social relationships in a meaningful way. It seems like it works but I maintain my social network dine without it. And yes I am fine having far fewer, but quality interactions. I don't think I impose any cost on my friends and family. If we can't chat once in a while via voice or video we just aren't that important....

[rayiner]

There isn’t some set number of relationships you can have such that you’ve got to pick out the “important” ones.

[dredmorbius]

Actually, there very much are.

Most people are familiar with Dunbar's number, which expresses the size of a total community. That's not the number of important relationships, but essentially the number of total relationships you can juggle.

In your life, should it be a reasonably long one, you'll experience about a half-million waking hours. If you get to know 10,000 people in your life, the total time you can dedicate to any one of them is about two days (48 hours).

In The Mythical Man Month, Fred Brooks notes the dynamics of team communications, which rapidly develop complexity after about 5-6 members. Programming teams, unless the work can be modularised to the extent teams have full independence generally lose effectiveness as they're scaled above this level.

The Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China -- effectively the inner cabal of government -- has ranged from 5-9 members, and is presently 7. (Each of them represents the interests of about 185 million Chinese.) Again, tight working groups simply do not scale past a large size.

I've been digging at various elements of this question for a few years, largely informally. But the clear point is that your relationship time is limited, that close relationships take time and investment, and that as attention is spread, the nature of those relationships tends to deteriorate.

(I'm not aware of specific literature on this offhand though I'm certain it exists.)

[bitexploder]

Thanks for writing that out that was pretty much where I was thinking :)

[bitexploder]

I think in a philosophical sense that is true. However, our wetware is just wired to keep about 100 fellow people close. More than that and relationships seem to become very superficial. Most people only maintain a very small number of close relationships. Those are the "important" ones. Importance is sort of decided naturally, though.

[jjeaff]

100 seems high. I have heard it's more like 12 to 15.

[arvin]

I think bitexploder is referring to the "Dunbar's number" which is 150.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

From the wiki: Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain only 150 stable relationships.

[ionised]

That's not actually true.

[2-4-Flinching]

> This seems like an inconvenience you impose on everyone else to do things Facebook handles natively.

If you're important to them, then people will do whatever they need to keep in touch with you. Inconvenience is when they don't care enough to keep in contact with you. While in a perfect world everyone would accept your impose line of communication, in your case Facebook, everyones preference is different.

[sp527]

I’d add that the relationships where you’re willing to go the extra distance are the only ones that matter. Quality not quantity.

[kiriakasis]

so... you could also be the one to go the extra mile and use facebook...

don't misunderstand i log in about once a month but because i have other platform (and because i'm terrible at keeping in touch), but other than political or idelogical reasons why not use it for your family convenience?

[mdorazio]

I think you've kind of missed the point the posters above are making. Facebook is impersonal. That's why it's convenient - it takes no effort whatsoever to share everything with everyone. As a result, the value of shared information to people who care about quality relationships is much lower than if two people deliberately communicate with only each other about something.

Put another way, if your family/friends can't be bothered to actually communicate with you one-on-one about things in their lives because it's less convenient than posting to everyone, then those relationships must not be very valuable. To those of us who care about maintaining quality relationships, convenience is a non-factor. I would much rather have lunch with a friend a few times a year than read their stream-of-life facebook posts on any kind of regular basis, even though the former is several orders of magnitude less convenient.

[kiriakasis]

So you should be available on (within many limits) all platforms. For somebody _not_ using facebook could be alienating.

Moreover there is a great difference in motivations and convenience; facebook is convenient for many people as a fact and there is nothing wrong with keeping contacts with acquaitances

[Al-Khwarizmi]

> If you're important to them, then people will do whatever they need to keep in touch with you.

Yes, but isn't it a bit ironic to say you don't use Facebook because it wastes your time, and then expect others to spend extra time communicating with you?

[sonnyz]

Maybe it is, but I'm sure that in my case, they enjoy the extra time they spend communicating with me.