There’s a new study out, the headline version of which is “We only really have two friends; it used to be three!”. The implication drawn by many commentators being that online social networking has made us more isolated, not less.
 
According to the Telegraph, this is what the study actually said: 
Matthew Brashears, an assistant professor at Cornell University, asked 2,000 adults to name the people they had “discussed important matters” with in the past six months.
Twenty-nine per cent of the test group named more than two people, 18 per cent listed two and 48 per cent listed only one person. Four per cent said they had not shared important personal details with anyone.
The average number was 2.03.

A couple of things occur to me immediately:

 - This is an American study. So when headlines say “we only have two friends”, the “we” is “2,000 people in the US”. Admittedly this is a large enough study to be statistically significant, but that’s not to say the situation is the same in the UK, let alone in Italy or Gambia or Pakistan – this is by no means a global “we”.
 
 - Important matters? If you asked me how many people I have discussed “important matters” with in the last six months, I would be stumped. Anyway, does it mean matters important to them, or to me? If the former, that would include everyone I’ve talked to about their relationships in the last half-year, which is already a good ten or so people. (It’s been a heavy few months.)
 
Or if it’s only matters that are important to me personally, then what counts? Talking about my relationship? I haven’t discussed my marriage in depth with anyone in the last six months, simply because I didn’t need to: I don’t have any problems with it. So let’s pick something else important to me: my children. I have talked to at least 50 people about them in that time, ranging from a casual chat with strangers on the bus to in-depth discussions of my daughter’s health problems with close friends.
 
Obviously, what is meant here is the latter: those deep, meaningful conversations you have with people you really trust. Or, you know, with people you quite like because they catch you in the right mood. Or with acquaintances at a party because you’re drunk. I don’t think this is actually the best measure for friendship, to be honest.
 
And as for social networking making us more isolated: this is all part of that weird thing the newspapers often do where they assume everyone you know on Facebook is by definition a pretend friend, and everyone on Twitter talks about what they had for breakfast all the time. Neither in any way reflects my experience. I have 170-odd people on my Facebook, for example, and they may not all be close friends, but some of them are, and others are old friends I’ve almost-but-not-quite lost touch with, or family, or colleagues I like, or friends of friends I find interesting. Are we really going to be so binary as to say that two people in your life get the accolade of ‘friend’ and everyone else might as well be sock puppets? No. I’m not doing it.
 
It’s sometimes said that the real definition of friend is someone who’ll help you bury a body at 3am. In which case, I suggest we bypass this morass of definitions and simply choose our friends by the strength of their digging arm and their lack of squeamishness when faced with a sudden corpse. Now that’s a study I’d like to see.