Friendship Theory (I Have None)

  Looking at the combination between the Six Degrees Of Separation, Buber's definiton of friends and Dunbar's number:

   Everyone has Dunbar's number. Your Dunbar's number is the maximum capacity for friends. This is 150. Anyone beyond 150 friends don't really count. He says this because we only have a cognitive capacity to retain information on 150 people - any more than that is nobody you can keep up with or know how they are.

  This doesn't need much explanation. It is a theoretical number that everyone has. Whether it's true or not can never really be tested. However, Dunbar's number is only for the capacity. It simple suggests that if we meet new people above, this we will forget stuff about someone less important.

  Dunbar does suggest that this number includes family.

  The real philosophical discussion comes of this when you define what makes you 'know' someone or who counts as a 'friend'. So now, just to give a bit of clarity to this I'll point you towards a very loose idea from a philosopher named 'Buber'

  Buber suggested that everyone you ever really lay eyes on in your life fits into two catagories. The I-it and the I-thou. They work like this:

I-it is someone who you have no real interest in, or know of and might smile at when you see them. This is the relationship you have with people who bump into from school who you never really spoke to and all you do is ask how eachother is and go away. This could also be your Doctor, or optician or a teacher.

I-it is basically anyone, so long as they're the people who you don't really know, or need to know - they are just there.

  So this goes without say that these people are not your 'friend' or count in your 'friend group'.

I-thou on the other hand is the type of people you wish to 'probe further'. The people who your relationship is explainable and you are more than happy to sit down and find out more about each other. These are the people that you care about and have a relationship with - friends, family, and lovers.

  These people are people in your social network.

  Buber put forward this theory with the idea of explaining about God. However, that is irrelevant to our point right now. So God will have to wait.

Moving swiftly on...

  The six degrees of seraration, if you are unaware, is an idea first put forward originally by the playwrite Frigyes Karinthy. It basically suggests that on a 'friend of a friend' basis you are about six people away from any other person in the world. Here's how it works:

 - You are friends with person A.
 - Person A is friends with person B
 - Therefore you are one degree away from person B

  It's as simple as that. Now the problem comes when people ask how there can only be 6 people between someone in a small town in the UK and someone in a small town in China? Or in a tribe in the Amazon? Well that's where modern media makes everything much easier - and with things like travelling and the popularity of backpacking.

  For example, I (in the UK) know someone who sometimes lectures in random Universities. He knows the celebrity scientist Brian Cox. Brian Cox knows the comedian Paul Merton and the legend Stephen Fry. Paul Merton did a documentary in China, and Stephen Fry in America. That puts me 4 Degrees away from loads of people in China and America. Then all the people they know puts me 5 away and then everyone they know puts me at that 6.

  This is quite an interesting web of social network. The fun comes where you pick celebrities and try to figure out how far away they are from you. You'd be surprised how many people are very close. There could be people who are only 1 degree away from you who you are yet to meet, and when you do meet them, then they unlock loads of other possibilities of who you could know.

  There are people who can move up from 5 degrees away to 1 degree away just because of someone on the new who you happen to talk to one day. There also could be people who are one drgree away all your life but never meet.

So, if we are to put these three theories together:

  We come up with something really rather interesting (to me) that means you have 150 people who you have an I-thou relationship with. Now if we just assume that everyone is at their capacity (although there are many people who have no friends. It's my own fault.) then we have a little bit of maths to do.

My name is Kyle. I have 150 I-thou friends. Each of those has 150 I-thou friends. I am 1 degree away from all of these people assuming that we do not know the same people.

150 x 150 = 22,500
22,500 x150 = 3,375,000
3,375,000 x 150 = 506,250,000
506,250,000 x 150 = 75,937,500,000

And within 3 degrees of separation, I would already know probably more than the total number of people who have ever lived.

  So this is where it's important to take into account that people know eachother. That your best friend and you probably share a lot of other close friends in your social web. So no matter how much it branches out, there will always be places where it returns back and finds someone who is closer. This removes some numbers from the web.

  If you take one route to find how far away you are from someone, there could be a second unknown route that puts you closer to them.

  On a final note. If you were to count everyone who ever lived, then the degrees get much longer as it has to sift through generations. But imagine how much closer you are than you think to Jesus, or Siddhartha Gautama (The Buddha).