Does More Facebook Friends Mean Less “Real” Friends?

Does having more virtual friends on Facebook mean having less true friends in real life?

That’s what a new study says conducted by Matthew Brashears, a Cornell University sociologist who surveyed more than 2,000 adults from a national database. He found that no matter how many friends you “add” on Facebook, the average person has 2.03 close friends. This number has dropped from 1985. Even though we may “friend” more acquaintances over Facebook, we have fewer really close friends – people we can trust and share intimate experiences with.

“These are the people you think of as your real confidants, your go-to people if you need something,” Brashears said.

Brashears asked people online from a database called TESS – Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences – to list the names of people with whom they had discussed “important matters” over the previous six months. In the study, 48 percent of participants listed one close friend when asked, 18 percent listed two and 29 percent listed more. A little more than 4 percent didn’t list anyone.

But social scientists say that virtual friendships may actually be healthy for us. Keith Hampton at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania advocated for social media in a post called “Internet users in general, but Facebook users even more so, have more close relationships than other people.”

“Facebook users get more overall social support, and in particular they report more emotional support and companionship than other people,” Hampton blogged. “And, it is not a trivial amount of support. Compared to other things that matter for support – like being married or living with a partner – it really matters. Frequent Facebook use is equivalent to about half the boost in support you get from being married.”

“We’re not becoming asocial,” said Brashears, “but these people give us social support, and they give us advice.”

Does that mean we’re more isolated in forging friendships online than in person or is this just a stereotype of the digital age and the advent of social media? Sound off in the comments below, collegiettes™!