Banana Boat Times
When you are new to a place my people say "you are fresh off the banana boat". A novice. To be in a perpetual state of exploration also renders you a novice.. thus these are the banana boat times.
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A quarter of a century ago, before Facebook, back in the day when you had to be indoors to phone somebody, we had an average of three friends each. The study – by Time Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS for short, and I’d definitely like to be her friend, she sounds fun) defined friends as close confidantes, people to whom you can tell anything. And now, when we’re Facebooked and Twittered up to our eyebrows, when we feel as if we’ve spent 40 days and nights in the desert after a half hour on the underground, how many friends do we have (expectant drumroll…)? Two. Not 857, after all. (And while we’re here, “friended” is not really a verb.)
This isn’t the first time an academic has poured cold water on the emotional possibilities of the Facebook phenomenon. Professor Robin Dunbar, in the early 1990s, proposed Dunbar’s number, the theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain social relationships. He defined these as relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person, though if you applied that to my boyfriend, it would drop to about 15 and I’m worried about whether or not my sister would be in it.
