ken_yap:
In the documentary The Virtual Revolution, a study of Facebook found that people with thousands of “friends” are actually outliers. The median Facebook user has only a dozen contacts. The real danger of Facebook is not that people are getting lots of “friends”, but that they are hooking themselves up into a feedback loop which keeps them in front of their screen or portable device all the time and they show symptoms of withdrawal if denied access.
A general comment not aimed at Flamebait. My take on this is that keeping in touch with everybody all the time isn’t healthy. Some things have to be done alone, e.g. learning to play music, reading a book, etc.
There’s a lot of social science going on with these kinds of networks. I guess they fall into a catagory between what we think they are and some sort of games. They are also useful as information gatherers.