“Your five today may not be your five-next week; people drift among layers and sometimes fall out of them altogether”. (Konnikova 236) Maria Konnikova is an Russian- American writer. Most of her works predominately focuses on psychology and its application to real life situations. In one of her articles “The Limits of Friendship”, she talks about how social media/ technology has affected relationships of people by performing research and different studies. She points out how social media/ technology have cause people to lose the ability to communicate and relate in person. Moreover, in her article she talks about psychologist Robin Dunbar who created the Dunbar number which is the theoretical number of friends we can really have, and the ways in which social networking is affecting not only this number but society as well. In like …show more content…
According to the text,” Dunbar did the math, using a ratio of neocortical volume to total brain volume and mean group size, and came up with a number.” (Konnikova 236) After doing this he was able to better determine the number of people an average person can have in their social group. For the last 20 years Dunbar has been exploring what that social group means and whether our ever-expanding social networks have done anything to change it. Correspondingly, Dunbar better explains this social group by breaking it down into different number groups. For example, he states that one hundred and fifty is the number of people we call casual friends. However, these numbers may change according to survey data results. In my opinion, social media like Instagram and Facebook has an impact on the Dunbar number and how they are changing the nature of human interaction. Although in my open the Dunbar number is not exactly all the way true but it is true in some