Anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorised that the maximum number of people any individual could maintain a relationship with was 150, which has become known as Dunbar’s number. It reflects the cognitive maximum for someone to know everyone in a group, and to be aware of the relationships between them all.
Social media has led to people into having many “friends” sometimes thousands, but in the human sense, they do not have a relationship, it is something different, for which I suspect we need a new term.
Human beings are social animals, and no matter how valuable our digital networks are to us, they are no substitute for the human interactions that define us, but are limited to around 150 individuals at any one time.
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