so last night, while it was very late, i tried an experiment that proved in some part a social hypothesis that a high school teacher of mine told a class i was in back when i was something like 15. this guy said, beautiful people have more friends because socialising is more important than study, while smart people have less friends because they are always involved in solitary study.
nothing like a cutting edge education to give you the big questions to ponder through life.
anyway, it was late and i was checking updates on facebook when this memory spontaneously popped into my head. i decided that i would put this theory to the test and be my own myth buster. in case you’re really wondering, i’m talking about beautiful people as in physically attractive good looking people. beauty as in skin deep. not beauty as in someone who is a really great person but is scare-your-dog butt ugly. (yes this is a shallow politically incorrect post just for something different).
facebook makes it pretty easy to browse the world of digitally connected people, who as we all know come from all walks of life. gone are the days when the internet was the playground of the tech elite, now any idiot that can work out how to open a laptop can get online and be part of a digital community.
starting with one pretty face, i followed a trail of friends – almost exclusively women – that lead me to every nook and cranny of the first world. at some point, i did take a moment to reflect how behind each digitized face there was actually a person with a life and emotions and a story to tell, which did reiterate to me again something i learned for myself a long time ago; we are all ‘just’ people with everything that implies. some of the numbers of friends though were quite astounding. most beautiful people had a minimum of around 250 friends, 400 wasn’t uncommon, with some people topping 900+ for the really popular folks. wow! i ‘only’ have 120 and i thought that was a lot.
then it was time for the benchmark, the ugly people. now before anyone reads this who might get upset by me calling someone ugly, i truly believe we are all beautiful on the inside, and beauty is no judge of character. mind you if you’re butt ugly, bad luck. join a gym to compensate. just like i did because i’m compensating for being butt ugly too.
making my way through the god-gave-me-a-face-only-a-mother-could-love girl crowd i was very surprised to notice that most of them had very small numbers of friends, completely the opposite of the beautiful people. 20 to 30 was normal with the higher range topping out at about 100. some individuals though did have quite big numbers like 600+ but they were exceptional, or prostitutes.
what to make of it all? there really was something in this theory of my old school teacher after all. the years of alcoholism brought on by the incessant suffering at the hands of cruel teenagers who would deride him with jokes behind his back yet within earshot, had not dulled his acute sense of human nature. i thought some time on it and came up with the following explanation.
beautiful people are more likely to be shallow and only interested in the facade of an individual; beauty is attracted to beauty, so only a superficial or casual encounter is enough to gain someone membership to a friends group. as long as you look the part you’re in, kinda like a club with a strict fashion policy. ugly people though have come to understand that quantity of friends does not make up for quality of friends, so having a small group of good people that enrich your life is better than hundreds of no name space fillers who annoy the crap out of you with their endlessly boring updates about which maybelline lipstick goes with their iphone. that or they truly have no social skills and can only make friends within the same subculture they belong to. my friend jens wrote a pretty good post about social behavior, genetics and virtual communities that really seems to have played out to be true based on my real world scientific results.
okay so i’m not really a scientist (i was faking that), and this hardly qualifies as a scientific experiment (because i’m not a scientist) but anecdotal evidence does suggest that there is some corresponding direct relationship between your maybelline beauty quotient and the number of friends you have on FB. which does represent a very cool hypothesis for starting some social science research to debunk or validate it. i’d do it if i had time, but i can’t even find the time to follow up on jens’s posts (this is an unpaid advertisement for http://www.unwesen.de/), so hopefully someone else has picked it up already.
but at the end of the day it’s not the number of friends you have on FB, but really how much cleavage you show if you’re a woman. this is really what men want to see, and they will friend anybody that caters to them. shallow insensitive beasts that we are!
andy.
ps: for those of you sitting here deriding me on my inability to spell, the exclusive use of lowercase alpha characters is me following a trend set by the great moby; artist, philosopher, philanthropist and blogger. one of the original bloggers, he was writing blogs before they were even called blogs, but rather online journals. secretly it’s also a fashion gimmick to attract more attention.
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