How Do You Rank Your Friends?

How do you rank your friends?


By Asmaa Malik, The Gazette

The idea of ranking friends becomes suddenly less shocking and revolutionary when you consider just how many meaningful people fill our livesYou can't put a price on friendship, but apparently you can give it a ranking.

My friend Farha, who has quite the circle of influence in her small university town, has devised a system for dealing with her friendships not just online, but in the real world.

Here's her hierarchy from the bottom up:

Tier 5: A new acquaintance introduced by mutual friends at a party.

Tier 4: Her younger sister's best friend.

Tier 3: A work colleague with whom she has a regular lunch date.

Tier 2: The girlfriend she goes shopping with every week.

Tier 1: Her most intimate confidante - oh, and her own husband.

For her, it's a way to organize her life and her free time.

Now, we all do that kind of prioritizing on some level. Reserving Saturday nights for intimate dinner parties, perhaps; meeting co-workers for drinks on Tuesdays; saving Sundays for family time. Or maybe we just draw the line between colleagues and outside-of-work friends.

It's one thing to live by these unspoken rules, but Farha actually tells people where they stand. It's gotten to the point where everyone in her social circle uses the same shorthand to describe the people in their lives. Some even use the rankings to label their privacy settings on Facebook.

But which came first, Facebook or friend management?

When the social networking site first exploded onto the scene, there was much consternation about how it stretched the meaning of the word "friend." Now, it's given us a mechanism to quantify how our so-called friends stack up.

Like many people with shrinking amounts of free time, I've developed a triage system over the years to manage how I communicate with my family and close friends. I call my parents in Baltimore every weekend, Skype with my brothers in Atlanta and D.C. about once a month, G-Talk with friends in Sydney and Toronto a couple of times a week and email a close friend in Tampa a few times a month.

Every medium I use says something about the significance of each relationship in my life. The frequency of interaction also speaks volumes.

The essential need for human interaction has not radically changed, but technology and the Internet have revolutionized the way we communicate.

On Facebook, you can give people as much or as little access as you want to your personal information - where you're going, what you're interested in, what you did on your summer vacation. And just by calling up your profile and putting together the pieces of what they can see, your friends and acquaintances instantly know how close you think they are. But, of course, you never talk about it - not to their faces, anyway.

When Farha first told me about the tier system and how openly her friends discuss it, I was appalled. How gauche and cruel, I thought. But after talking to her about it in detail, I was relieved to learn she wasn't revealing some kind of mean-girl streak for stating What Must Not Be Spoken.

Farha is a sociologist who studies gender and friendship. Our personal relationships, she explained to me, are an important part of our identities and are not to be taken lightly. She has a theoretical framework for understanding social tier systems and how they apply to her own friendships.

The theory, she says, has been useful in practice, as she and her friends have been able to bypass much of the drama that comes from messy relationships. When people are upfront about their rankings, it seems, there is less ambiguity.

In the early 1990s, in a time before social media as we now know them, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar devised a theory about the maximum number of friends a person could maintain stable relationships with. Dunbar's number is meant to represent the number of people who actually know how they are related to one person. That number is 150.

Dunbar's research was based not on human interactions, but on an extrapolation of a study of primate behaviour, and the limit he presented has little to do with the complexities of friendships. He theorized that 150 relationships are all that our brains can handle.

In this heyday of social media, most younger Facebook users have upwards of 200 friends, with various levels of privacy settings. To take Dunbar's number rather literally, if we have the capacity as humans to maintain only 150 friendships, who are all of these extra people?

They're consequential strangers. First coined by psychologist Karen Fingerman, the phrase refers to all of the people on the periphery of your life: your yoga teacher, your pet sitter, your favourite barista.

In their 2004 book, Fingerman and journalist Melinda Blau define them as "people who are so much a part of our everyday life that we take them for granted."

One way to determine who falls into this category is to draw up a list of people to whom you send holiday cards. Once you take away those the book calls "the intimates," who's left? People you don't stay in touch with regularly but who still mean something to you.

"Consequential strangers anchor us in the world and give us a sense of being plugged into something larger," Fingerman and Blau say. "They offer us opportunities for novel experiences and information that is beyond the purview of our inner circles."

Social media offer us a way to define these relationships and integrate them into our digital lives. Many of these consequential strangers are also your "Tiers 4 & 5" Facebook friends.

The idea of ranking friends becomes suddenly less shocking and revolutionary when you consider just how many meaningful people fill our lives - and that there are only 52 weekends a year to fit in those closest to us.

Of course, my other friends tell me the only reason I've come around to accepting the tier system is because I just found out where I stand. Apparently, I'm in Tier 0.5.