1. Predict.
In this section you will read different blog posts about friendship, but first you will watch videos of people answering questions about friendship. Two of the questions they were asked are below. What do you think the most common answers were?
2. Opinions about friendship.
Read the summaries of answers to the two questions, then watch and match the summaries to the speakers.
3. A blog post.
Read the first part of a blog post. What do you think is the most likely title for the post?
[Choose best title below]
The other week I posted the following status update on Facebook:
"The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us." (Dunbar, R. 1996. Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, p. 77).
With 141 FB friends, I am dangerously near the 150 point. Time for some discreet culling? ;-)
The comment was tongue-in-cheek, obviously, but there was a semi-serious point to it. I'm not the first – by a long chalk – to want to broadcast the fact that it's simply not possible to have thousands of "friends", unless friendship is redefined in such a way as to leach it of all meaning entirely. When I finally took the FB plunge I vowed to friend only those people whom I'd actually met and whose names I could remember – already stretching the meaning of friend to breaking point – and, by and large, I've kept to that pledge.
But more about that later. Professor Robin Dunbar, whose calculation of 150 manageable "friends" is a key element in his compelling argument as to how language originated (Dunbar, 1996), was in the news again recently. Using a massive dataset of nearly 2 million mobile phone calls and 500 million text messages collected over a seven-month period, Dunbar and his colleagues tracked the way that relationship patterns vary over time and according to gender. Among their findings were "a marked sex difference in investment in relationships during the period of pair-bond formation, suggesting that women invest much more heavily in pair bonds than do men". Not only that, the results of the study "tend to support the claim that mother-daughter relationships play a particularly seminal role in structuring human social relationships". All this based on who people talk to (or text), how often, and over how long a period of time.
From a blog post from "An A-Z of ELT" by Scott Thornbury
Choose the most likely title for this blog post.
4. A summary of the extract.
Read the first part of the blog post again and choose the best summary for it.
G is for gossip and social grooming
The other week I posted the following status update on Facebook:
"The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us." (Dunbar, R. 1996. Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, p. 77).
With 141 FB friends, I am dangerously near the 150 point. Time for some discreet culling? ;-)
The comment was tongue-in-cheek, obviously, but there was a semi-serious point to it. I'm not the first – by a long chalk – to want to broadcast the fact that it's simply not possible to have thousands of "friends", unless friendship is redefined in such a way as to leach it of all meaning entirely. When I finally took the FB plunge I vowed to friend only those people whom I'd actually met and whose names I could remember – already stretching the meaning of friend to breaking point – and, by and large, I've kept to that pledge.
But more about that later. Professor Robin Dunbar, whose calculation of 150 manageable "friends" is a key element in his compelling argument as to how language originated (Dunbar, 1996), was in the news again recently. Using a massive dataset of nearly 2 million mobile phone calls and 500 million text messages collected over a seven-month period, Dunbar and his colleagues tracked the way that relationship patterns vary over time and according to gender. Among their findings were "a marked sex difference in investment in relationships during the period of pair-bond formation, suggesting that women invest much more heavily in pair bonds than do men". Not only that, the results of the study "tend to support the claim that mother-daughter relationships play a particularly seminal role in structuring human social relationships". All this based on who people talk to (or text), how often, and over how long a period of time.
From a blog post from "An A-Z of ELT" by Scott Thornbury
Which is the best summary of this extract of the post?
5. Idiomatic expressions.
Read the first part of the blog post again and choose the best definitions for the underlined phrases.
G is for gossip and social grooming
The other week I posted the following status update on Facebook:
"The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us." (Dunbar, R. 1996. Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, p. 77).
With 141 FB friends, I am dangerously near the 150 point. Time for some discreet culling? ;-)
The comment was tongue-in-cheek, obviously, but there was a semi-serious point to it. I'm not the first – by a long chalk – to want to broadcast the fact that it's simply not possible to have thousands of "friends", unless friendship is redefined in such a way as to leach it of all meaning entirely. When I finally took the FB plunge I vowed to friend only those people whom I'd actually met and whose names I could remember – already stretching the meaning of friend to breaking point – and, by and large, I've kept to that pledge.
But more about that later. Professor Robin Dunbar, whose calculation of 150 manageable "friends" is a key element in his compelling argument as to how language originated (Dunbar, 1996), was in the news again recently. Using a massive dataset of nearly 2 million mobile phone calls and 500 million text messages collected over a seven-month period, Dunbar and his colleagues tracked the way that relationship patterns vary over time and according to gender. Among their findings were "a marked sex difference in investment in relationships during the period of pair-bond formation, suggesting that women invest much more heavily in pair bonds than do men". Not only that, the results of the study "tend to support the claim that mother-daughter relationships play a particularly seminal role in structuring human social relationships". All this based on who people talk to (or text), how often, and over how long a period of time.
6. The second extract.
Read the next part of the blog and mark the statements below true or false.
The way that language both shapes and is shaped by social networks has been a recurrent theme in Dunbar's work. The book on gossip (1996) outlines the thesis that, when our primate forebears descended from the trees onto the African savannah, the ecological need to form larger and larger social groupings required other means, apart from mutual grooming, for bonding and group cohesion. It was simply not possible to groom your whole clan at one sitting. Language, specifically the phatic use of language that we have come to call gossip, provided an alternative to grooming. "Language has two interesting properties compared to grooming: you can talk to several people at once and you can talk while travelling, eating or working in the fields" (Dunbar 1992:30). By sharing information about other clan members, speakers not only cemented group ties but laid down norms of acceptable behaviour. "Language evolved to allow us to gossip" (Dunbar 1996:79).
7. The last extract.
Read the last extract of the blog post and choose the option that best summarises the writer's point of view.
8. More about friendship.
Read extracts from a newspaper article. In this article, Tom Bartlett also reflects on Robin Dunbar's figure as being the maximum number of friends. Choose the best title for the article.
[Choose best title below]
February 14, 2012, 5:03 p.m.
By Tom Bartlett
THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
Your maximum number of real friends is 150, according to Robin Dunbar, which is a finding often cited to show that having a large number of Facebook friends is silly. The idea behind "Dunbar's number", as it's usually called, is that human beings can't maintain meaningful relationships with more than (roughly) 150 people. There is a cognitive upper limit on friendship – our brains can't handle more buddies. But that doesn't mean having lots of friends on Facebook is meaningless. In fact, according to a new study, having a higher number of Facebook friends, even well past Dunbar's number, seems to increase life satisfaction. The researchers surveyed 88 college students about their Facebook habits (number of friends, frequency of wall posts, etc.) and then measured how satisfied the students were with their lives. The researchers found that students who had more friends on Facebook were more satisfied. Among those surveyed, the mean was 440 friends; the most virtually gregarious student had 1,200; and one online hermit had 29. A majority of those Facebook friendships were superficial – someone they play soccer with or sat behind in poli sci. From the paper:
Participants' reports of larger networks and larger estimated audiences for status updates predicted both life satisfaction and perceived social support. Proportion of close contacts did not. These findings constitute evidence that emerging adults are adapting psychologically to the affordances of social network site tools.
The key phrase there is perceived social support. College students aren't having actual friendships with most of these so-called friends. The mean number of close contacts was 80, so the other several hundred friends aren't providing actual social support. But simply thinking you have a more sizeable audience for expressing your excitement about the coming weekend or bemoaning your post-graduation job prospects makes college students feel better.
...
It's been thought that when you have more friends than the magic 150, these are backup friends – contacts you might call on should your other friendships fall away. But according to this study, backup friends are serving an important role right now by providing you with an audience for your updates. Since most of those relationships aren't real, it doesn't seem to matter whether those friends are actually reading your posts or even logging on. You just need to think they are.
Choose the most likely title for this post.