By Steve Brawner

© 2018 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

I was mad at someone on Facebook, until I saw him in real life.

The victim of my annoyance was an Arkansas state legislator who posted something online I didn’t agree with. There was a brief back and forth, nothing serious and perfectly civil, and then it ended. But the debate stayed with me.

A day or two later, the Legislature had just dismissed from its special session, and the governor had just finished a press conference. I was writing my story while sitting in a vacant committee room when that same legislator hurried down the stairs and passed by. He was carrying belongings with both hands and nodded through the window in a friendly way, and I smiled and waved.

I realized I wasn’t mad at the actual person I’d just seen.

“Friends” that aren’t friends

Facebook and other forms of social media are remarkable tools. They’ve enabled me to reclaim relationships from my past and keep in touch with family members, friends, and classmates. Social media helps my writings reach a wider audience.

But there’s something about that form of communication, about being connected but only loosely and having “friends” that aren’t friends, that doesn’t fit with us.

Some animals can communicate over distances. The moans of blue whales can travel thousands of miles through the ocean. Elephants can use low-frequency rumblings to talk to each other from miles away. Their brains are made that way.

Humans are not made that way. We’re made for close conversation. We have a remarkable ability to distinguish each face from any other, even with identical twins. Face-to-face conversations allow us to read emotions and gauge the effects of our words and actions – to ensure we don’t hurt another’s feelings or create an enemy.

The byproduct of that combination of empathy and fear? Respect.

Voice-to-voice conversations via the telephone, though harder, are still effective because we’re attuned to the changes in another’s tone. If we think we’ve offended someone, we probably have. And there are consequences.

Social media platforms enable us to have relationships without respect. We don’t see the hurt or anger in another person’s eyes, and we don’t fear their response nearly as much. It’s so hard to extricate ourselves from a disagreement in the real world that we avoid having one in the first place. In the digital world, all it takes is a mouse click.

Dunbar’s number: 150 is about our limit

Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Oxford, says that humans can maintain relationships with about 150 people. That’s a typical size of hunter-gatherer tribes and other types of communities. It’s just a theory, of course. But undoubtedly throughout human history our relationships have involved a relatively small number of people who have lived near us and shared our challenges and values.

That 150 number sounds about right to me. And yet I have 872 Facebook friends. I don’t even know who some of these people are. And yet their musings and opinions fill my news feed, just as mine do theirs.

We’re experiencing a revolution in human interaction. With social media and smartphones, we’re being forced to adapt to rapid changes in our environment – too quickly, maybe, than we can. It’s the equivalent of a meteor striking the planet and changing everything around us immediately. Made for individual, face-to-face communication – and not that much, because there used to be too much work to do – we now exist in a cacophony of distant voices.

We need communities. Instead, we have “networks.”

How Facebook is a good thing

As I wrote this, Facebook was reminding me that I’ve been friends online with a dear woman I’ve known in the real world all my life. She’s my parents’ age and is the only person I call “aunt” who’s not related to me. She wrote that she thinks I am “very special and has been since birth.”

Aww. I’m not getting off Facebook. It enables me to keep up with her and others like her.

But maybe it also makes it easier not to take the time to visit her in Fayetteville, only three hours away.

I guess the solution is to find the people who matter the most, to see them face to face when possible, and to use social media to communicate respectfully across the distances – like the elephants and whales, while being mindful that they’re made to do that, and we’re not.