Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships

by Robin I.M. Dunbar

The negative observation has been just how poorly applications like Zoom and Skype actually work for large social groups. It is only really possible for one person to speak at a time, so it tends to default into a bit of a lecture. You can’t slip off to the side of the conversation to have a private word with someone the way you can when everyone is sitting round a big table. In other words, the assembled company cannot break up into several different conversations. One consequence of this is a tendency for the more shy and retiring folk to retreat into silence while the extraverts dominate the conversation.

In the end, unless it is a deeply strong relationship, nothing on the digital earth will prevent that friendship quietly subsiding into an acquaintanceship – someone I once knew.

In one of his seminal studies, Bob Kraut undertook a longitudinal study of adults moving to a new city for work and found that those who made most use of the internet devoted less time to developing new friendships in the face-to-face world, and as a result their levels of depression and loneliness increased.

In another study of 169 people in 73 households during the first year or two after becoming regular internet users, he found that the more someone used the internet, the less they communicated with their family members in the household, the smaller the size of their social circle, and the more likely they were to have experienced depression and loneliness.

Data from longitudinal studies did, however, suggest some modest but significant long-term effects. Increased satisfaction with life correlated with reduced use of online technology a year later; conversely, increased technology use predicted lower life-satisfaction a year later.

Much may, however, depend both on what adolescents do online and how they do it.

In each case, they noted a slight downturn in wellbeing when no time at all was spent online. It strikes me that any teenager who spends no time at all online, or even on a smartphone, is rather unlikely to be especially well adjusted as an individual, and hence that the downturn at the low end may be a signal of someone in serious trouble,

In a very recent survey of more than 10,500 adolescents in Iceland, Ingibjorg Thorisdottir and her collaborators found that while active social media use seemed to reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression, passive use had the opposite effect and increased the frequency of these symptoms, and this remained so even when controlling for known risk factors like lack of self-esteem, offline peer support and poor body image.

Using digital media to seek reassurance doesn’t calm you down and may, in fact, lead to the steady accumulation of stress rather than its dissipation.

If children spend a lot of their time online, they may not be gaining the experience they should be having in two important respects. First, most of their interactions online are dyadic rather than involving many individuals in a group. Second, if someone does kick metaphorical sand in their face, they can simply pull the plug; there is no obligation to learn how to compromise. If so, their social skills will be less well developed, and, as a consequence, the size of social network they can handle is likely to be smaller. They may also be less good at dealing with rejection, offence and failure to achieve. The worrying thing is that we won’t know for a generation whether this is the case or not.

Reflecting back on what we have learned in this exploration of friendship, these new ways of interacting socially provide us with two final important insights.

One is that these new media provide ways of maintaining friendships under circumstances where, in the past, those friendships would have quietly died because it was no longer possible to meet face to face. This is especially beneficial for our psychological wellbeing when we move as much as we now do, and so inevitably find ourselves in places where we know no one. Being able to contact old friends buffers us against the loneliness that would otherwise engulf us, and helps ease us into the new social environment by buying us time.

The other insight derives from the fact that digital media have provided us with a massive natural experiment that has allowed us to examine how and, more importantly, why our social world is as constrained as it is. The fact that our online social world is virtually identical to our offline social world tells us that the constraints are in our minds and not in the technology of how we communicate: it is the cognitive limits on our capacity to enga...

We have to talk to people and engage in social activities with them, and that often involves a degree of physicality, of touch and casual caresses, that is impossible to do online.