Friendship: why social networks are too crowded to get close

For some time now, I've been struggling with what I call "social network emotional anaemia". The online world – rich with the communities that I once loved and learned from, the connections I forged, the old schoolmates I rediscovered, the relationships that I cultivated and maintained – has become increasingly empty as a space to perform "friendship". I'm no longer receiving the same degree of closeness I feel I need from the network; well, not from the people who matter most to me, at least. I see them offline in the pub, the theatre, the garden and the coffee shop. I talk to them on the phone. I've even taken to writing paper letters to them, because the process demands more of my time and attention. It feels more personal, more special. Also, paper smells nice.

It's in these richer "media" where I have the liminal conversations with the people I consider friends, where we set the mortar that bonds us by talking with the freedom the keyboard doesn't afford and where distraction is, oddly, less prevalent. It's where we do the stuff that we upload later. The chat that we used to do on Twitter (planning activities, bantering) or on Facebook (share photos of babies) now feels transient and insignificant. Increasingly, my online world is full of strangers with whom I'm too scared to interact, or feel I should add to a Google+ circle called: "I Don't Know You From Adam So Stay Here And Please Don't Bite, Thanks".

I wonder if I'm surfing the same zeitgeist that's inspired the reported decline in Facebook usage in Britain and the US, or if I'm just suffering a crisis of confidence in the most revolutionary communication technology of our time. The web's raison d'être, after all, is to connect us (via information). I'm beginning to feel, though, that these connections are increasingly meaningless.

This is a problem. For more than a decade, I have been a very public believer in the power of people to overcome the limitations of the software. According to all the research – with the exception of one over-referenced paper by Robert Kraut from 1998 (with findings retracted by its authors in 2002) – we imbue online interactions with interpersonal significance in a way that increases the number of friends in our social networks and decreases a sense of isolation. Online activity creates both bridging social capital – connecting us with friends we'd never have met – and bonding social capital – the stuff that reinforces our links and brings us closer together. And, according to a large-scale study released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project in 2006, the more we use the web, the truer this becomes.

I've also been part of the research community that has spent 20 years identifying little behavioural "tells" that delineate closeness and distance in computer-mediated communication: is the connection reciprocated? That's a start. One-way relationships tend to be hangers on or jilted lovers who refuse to give in. Do you only chat where everyone can eavesdrop on your conversation? Do you also hang out in a backchannel, where sociologist Erving Goffman says people let their guards down and exchange more intimate information? Getting closer. Do you use both public and private channels? Closest still. Add a connection on another network, chat that crosses over to other media and some face time, and you're probably BFFs. The more interaction over the more modalities translates into higher perceptions of trust. And that is what makes society function, especially online.

So why have I lost the faith? It may be because I have too many connections. It's easy to click "friend" on Facebook or "follow" on Twitter. On the latter, I don't even have the choice of whether someone's connected to me or not. These networks have had to operationalise the inscrutable concept "friendship" into binary code of 1s and 0s, because that's how the technology works. They don't allow for a holistic, nuanced approach to human emotion because they are machines. Facilities such as circles on Google+ try to accommodate for our soft squishiness, but we are fuzzy creatures with weird boundaries that shift and change. That's why we psychologists have to look for other indicators of friendship, even offline. There's an entire field of research dedicated to specifying the content of connections, and if we can't do it in person, you can bet the online version is left wanting.

Also, as far as I can tell, each additional node on an online friendship network reduces the significance of the connections that came before. It's impossible to keep up. I can't identify what's important anymore, and so rather than interacting, I just offload. That doesn't help forge friendships; it becomes a one-way communication platform. You'd not say you're friends with the people on your telly, so how is my stream-of-consciousness twitterfeed any different? I should have listened to Professor Robin Dunbar when he answered the question in his most recent book, How Many Friends Does One Person Need? We can really cognitively and biologically only handle a maximum community of 150 people, and then, there are probably about 50 who really matter.

Perhaps my problem with the network is how I've chosen to use it. The main criticism with Prof Kraut's 1998 article was that there were too few people online. Now, ironically, there may be too many. As the web continues to iterate and evolve to better serve our needs, I may re-establish my friendship with it. But I think it will still take a while until it matches my expectations.