wasn’t the first time I had heard that term; it is a fairly common honorific among men in Facebookland. Coming from
Clay, though, it was especially gratifying.
Meanwhile, Barbara was completely losing it. She
couldn’t understand why I had given up so much of my
precious spare time to get lost in an obsessive quest that, in
her view, was about as life affirming as channel surfing. She
compared my dalliance with Facebook to the sorry pursuit
of a middle-aged playboy who gives up a perfectly good life
just to see how many notches he can add to his belt.
To be honest, Barbara
had a point. Gone were the
Sundays when she and I
would take long walks in
the park or visit museums
or have a quiet dinner
at our favorite bistro down the street.
I’d even abandoned my true passion—oil painting—and
hadn’t finished reading a book in months. One Sunday after
I had wasted the whole day on Facebook, Barbara tried the
tough-love approach: “I hate to say this, honey, but you really need help. There must be a shrink you can talk to. This
little habit of yours is not that great for our marriage.”
I agreed to look into it. But instead of going to a therapist,
I turned—where else?—to Facebook. On the Facebook site
I found a test to determine whether I had what is known as
Facebook Addiction Disorder (FAD). The test included 20
questions, to be rated on a scale of increasing addiction from
1 to 5. Among them: How often do you fear that life without
Facebook would be boring, empty, and joyless? (I said 3) And:
How often do others in your life complain to you about the
amount of time you spend on Facebook? ( 5) I ended up with
a score of 70 on a scale of 100. The diagnosis: “You are experi-
encing occasional or frequent problems because of Facebook.”
I wasn’t certifiable yet, I guess. But as time went by—and
I crossed the 500-friend mark—I started feeling I was caught
in an endless game of diminishing returns. Oxford anthro-
pologist Robin Dunbar, Ph.D., has concluded that the cogni-
tive power of the human brain limits the size of the social
networks we can sustain. In other words, he says, the outside
limit for human friendships is roughly 150. As soon as my
circle of friends exceeded the Dunbar number, I learned, the
experience became less intimate and more like watching TV.
Other
Addictive
Facebook
Apps
All networked out?
There are hundreds
of other fun things
to do on Facebook,
such as:
