The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Polonius

  • If you don’t know, who do you ask?

    I’d been asking, like a smart aleck or wise guy school-kid, a couple of Artificial Intelligence apps (Gemini and ChatGPT) questions to see if I could stump them. The apps provide disclaimers. ChatGPT cautions, “ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.” I questioned ChatGPT what is meant by “important.” In short, important is any fact or idea that you might rely on to your detriment if proven wrong.

    I was also thinking of the Universe, and William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”: “To see a world in a grain of sand….The questioner, who sits so sly, Shall never know how to reply.”

    I asked ChatGPT how many photos had been uploaded to Instagram since its beginning:

    Based on the latest available data, here’s what we know about Instagram:

    📸 Total Photos & Videos Shared

    Instagram has seen over 50 billion photos and videos uploaded since its launch on October 6, 2010 wired.com+4en.wikipedia.org+4time.com+4increditools.com+4earthweb.com+4predis.ai+4.

    📈 Recent Upload Rates

    Estimates from mid‑2024 to early 2025 indicate that:

    • Roughly 1,074 photos/video posts are uploaded per second
    • That equates to about 95 million posts per day, or almost 4 million per hour

    I retrieved that data a few days ago, so I caution my reader to recheck the numbers with ChatGPT if important. The universe is expanding.

    I then asked ChatGPT about blogs, how many new blog posts go up daily:

    WordPress.com alone sees roughly 2.3 million new blog posts per day.

    All blogging platforms combined—WordPress.org, Tumblr, Medium, Blogger, self-hosted setups, and more—generate around 7.5 million posts daily.

    I then asked, considering social media formats, at what point, a tipping point or a break-even point – what is the number or percent a user can functionally follow other users? ChatGPT’s answer was long and involved, including definitions I had not specifically asked for:

    Tipping Point in Following Behavior
    This is the point at which a user starts experiencing diminishing returns from following more accounts — the quality of their feed drops, content becomes more generic or algorithmically filtered, and they lose meaningful engagement with individuals.

    Breakeven Point for Social Value
    This could be defined as the point where a user’s following count results in reciprocal value — e.g., they follow others and start receiving useful content or engagement in return.

    I might have thought ChatGPT would quote John Cage somewhere in its answer, but it did not. The Cage quote I might have suggested, my paraphrase here: “If you don’t know the answer, why are you asking the question”?

    One     day                                                     down     at
       Black     Mountain     College,
                                                                          David     
    Tudor     was     eating     his     lunch.

                                               A     student     came     over
        to     his     table     and     began     asking     him
     questions.

                                           David     Tudor
                                                                      went     on
     eating     his     lunch.

              The     student
                                         kept     on     asking     
    questions.

                                       Finally
                  David     Tudor     looked     at     him     and
     said,
                                 “If     you     don’t     know,

                                                 why     do      you      ask?”

    Copied from “Indeterminacy,” compiled by Eddie Kohler, here.

    Why, indeed, not to mention who. Who (or what) do you ask? (And before you get your red pencil out, I know all about who and whom, but I’ve my own style book here at the Toads, and I’ve unfollowed whom, so don’t bother.) I first read “Indeterminacy” in John Cage’s book titled “Silence” (1961, 1973, Wesleyan) – from page 260:

    “In oral delivery of this lecture, I tell one story a minute. If it’s a short one, I have to spread it out; when I come to a long one, I have to speak as rapidly as I can” (260).

    Part of ChatGPT’s answer to my question regarding the number of social media accounts one can follow or be followed with meaningful contact referenced “Dunbar’s Number”:

    📊 Data-Based Estimates and Psychological Limits

    1. Cognitive Limit — Dunbar’s Number (~150)

    • Humans can meaningfully maintain social relationships with around 150 people.
    • In social media, this is often expanded because of the passive nature of interaction — but past ~500–1,000 follows, users typically experience:
      • Less meaningful engagement
      • Algorithmic filtering becomes dominant

    👉 Tipping point for meaningful social following: ~150–500 follows
    Beyond that, you don’t “functionally” follow people — the algorithm filters most content out.

    What is meaningful or reciprocally engaging of course differs depending on one’s purpose or goal and the type of social media format one’s using. I did know the answer, but I wanted ChatGPT to confirm and provide some data with support. I was just playing around. But I had not heard of Dunbar’s Number. Dunbar’s Number is 150 – humans can interact meaningfully with 150 others. A further breakdown of Dunbar’s Number as supplied by ChatGPT follows:

    Dunbar’s Number (~150) is more than just a single limit. Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, proposed that human social relationships are layered in discrete tiers, each with its own emotional closeness and frequency of interaction.

    🔹 Dunbar’s Social Group Layers

    These layers form a hierarchy of relationships, expanding by a rough factor of ~3 at each level:

    LayerApprox. SizeRelationship TypeCharacteristics
    1. Support Clique3–5Closest relationshipsDaily contact, deep emotional support (best friends, close family)
    2. Sympathy Group12–15Good friendsWeekly contact, trusted confidants
    3. Close Network~50Friends you would invite to a partyMonthly contact, mutual interest, still emotionally meaningful
    4. Casual Network~150Dunbar’s NumberPeople you know and recognize by name/face, occasional contact
    5. Acquaintances~500Recognizable individualsLow or no emotional intensity, weak ties (colleagues, mutuals)
    6. Faces Known~1,500People whose faces you recognizeStored in memory, but not personally connected

    🔸 What This Means for Social Media

    • Most people can recognize ~1,500 profiles, but only maintain meaningful interaction with ~150.
    • Your Instagram close friends list or Twitter DMs likely reflects the 15–50 layer.
    • Follows, likes, or casual comments beyond the 150–500 range are often algorithmically or socially shallow. 

    I don’t mention any of this to cause or reflect distress, and I think most users intuitively realize a law of large numbers at work with regard to social media accounts, but I want to emphasize the importance, significance, or value of any relatively small number of followers writers may have, or may be following, not necessarily as “follow backs” without ever looking again, but in efforts to maintain meaningful reading and writing encounters, effort that takes time and trust and mutual engagement.

    There is of course much more to this discussion one might pursue (the phenomenom of likes and comments, or lack thereof, for example), but this has been question and answer enough. To follow is not necessarily to befriend; to unfollow is not necessarily to defriend. In summary, I’m reminded of the advice Shakespeare’s Polonius gives to his son Laertes:

    “Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel” (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3).

    But Polonius, in spite of his reputation for sound advice, is a bumbling fool and not to be trusted, and anyway, who wants to be grappled to another’s soul with a hoop of steel, particularly where grapple means wrestle and struggle?

  • Friendship in Olivia Manning’s Balkan and Levant Trilogies

    “Guy needs a friend,” Harriet tells Dobson in Chapter Six of “The Danger Tree,” the first novel in “The Levant Trilogy,” where we find the same characters we met in “The Balkan Trilogy,” while introduced to new ones, too, as Harriet and Guy, a young English couple newlywed at the beginning of World War II, on the run from the invading Nazis, first from Bucharest then Athens, now find themselves in Cairo, in fear of having to run again as Rommel is rumored to be only hours away.

    “Needs a friend! But no one has more friends.”

    “There are friends and friends. There are those who want something from you and those who will do something for you. Guy has plenty of the first. He’s rather short of the second.”

    “Do you mean that?”

    “Yes. He collects depressives, neurotics and dotty people who think he’s the answer to their own inadequacy.”

    “And is he?”

    “No, there is no answer.”

    p. 140, NYRB, 2014, first published 1982 as “The Levant Triology” by Penguin.

    Later – alone, out of money, apart from Guy and adrift from Cairo into Syria, unable to find work, suspect and strange, following her rash escape, both deliberate and random, Harriet finds friends, and reflects,

    “…she, an admirer of wit, intelligence and looks in a man, was beginning to realize that kindness, if you had the luck to find it, was an even more desirable quality” (497).

    But is kindness alone enough?

    “Lister was kind but, thinking of his fat, pink face, his ridiculous moustache, his wet eyes and baby nose, she told herself that kindness was not enough” (525).

    Like Lister, many of Manning’s characters seem to walk on as if just out of a Shakespeare play. The critic Harold Bloom saddled Shakespeare with inventing the human. Shakespeare certainly made ample studies, having created well over a thousand characters in his plays. Manning too produces a host of characters, and while she doesn’t forge the human, she does fashion personality: quirks and tics, foibles and fears, motivations and enthusiasms – ways of being, but not always of one’s own choosing: why are we the way we are, and can we change? How do we make friends? How do we keep them? But none of Manning’s characters stand alone; they are each part of some social imbroglio: a picaresque duo; peasant families forced from their homes into refugee status; government administrators lost in corridors of bureaucracy; bosses and the bossed about; soldiers in lines marching off and stumbling back; colleagues and acquaintances and friends going to work, meeting in cafes for drinks or dinner, attending concerts or lectures, sightseeing, going on walks, always talking. Manning’s friends come together to join up and to disassemble, to get news, to ask questions, to criticize and admire, scold and berate, laugh and cry amid betrayals and sacrifices.

    In the first book of the trilogies, “The Great Fortune,” Guy produces and directs a Shakespeare play. The whole enlarged endeavor is a sort of aside, meant to give the locals a respite from their anxiety over the war threatening near, but also to give the novel a subplot to view the interconnections of characters – their relationships, how they get along or not with one another, thrown together by chance and circumstance. The play is “Troilus and Cressida,” its amateur performance played once in Bucharest in 1940 a great success. But while just about everyone Guy knows has some part in the production, Harriett has no role to play but that of an observer.

    In “Hamlet,” Shakespeare gives the bumbling Polonius the job of dispensing advice, now responsible for a litany of trite sayings repeated usually without knowing the questionable credibility of the speaker. A favorite of mine:

    Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
    Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;

    To grapple is to hook, as a grape plant does with its tendrils. But who wants to be grappled to someone else’s soul?

    The second half of Polonius’s advice on friendship is usually dropped from the reference:

    But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
    Of each new hatched unfledged comrade.

    To be fledged is to be feathered for flight. How does one prepare for the flight of one’s friends?

    Harriet and Guy’s friends jockey for position but more for survival. The loss of friendship becomes so common one seeks to avoid making new friends. This is the case with Simon Boulderstone, a British soldier in Egypt to fight in the desert war. Simon shares in alternating chapters with Harriet protagonist duties. He quickly loses the two Army friends he made on his way to Egypt. But he falls in with the tried and true buddy system, then loses a couple of good buddies. Simon learns one fights and dies not for one’s country but for one’s friends. He also learns friends that glitter often bleed lead.

    Entangled in the theme of friendship is the theme of personality, how and why some are attracted to others while others are not, and may even be repelled. How and why relationships that start off so sweet often turn so sour and bitter. How and why some people have certain needs and wants that others readily cast off as useless burdens. How and why we use others in the guise of friendship then rid ourselves of them when the use grows obsolete. At the same time, we find friends who, as the saying goes, stick through the thick and thin, don’t abandon ship at the first sign of taking on water. In the end, we find Harriet and Guy the best of friends, which may mean putting up with one another’s spontaneous and fickle lack of friendship or having to entertain the friendship of others who if alone would not come close.

  • Of Friendship

    “Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel,” the bumbling Lord Polonius in Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet” tells his son Laertes in a rant of advice often repeated since as sage and sound. But who wants to be grappled with a metal belt? Neither is friendship a luxury cruise liner where one might go shopping for a friend. A rowboat, maybe, lost on some stormy night on some stormy sea in some stormy argument, a crew of two with only one oar. A lack of friends may be associated with loneliness, and one is often never so lonely as when part of a crowd in which one can find no partner. Acquaintances and neighbors are often confused with friends when they are not. Likewise, parents, children, and siblings, when impressed as friends are often the first to jump ship. A friend at court can hardly be trusted, neither is one’s cohort a circle of friends. A friend in need is not free. To simply like is not necessarily to befriend. What is the focus point of a circle of friends? One’s spouse must not be mistaken for one’s friend, nor one’s friend mistaken for one’s spouse. Friendship is not a vessel, unless it is a ship of fools.

  • Hamlet’s Status (A Play in Six Posts)

    Hamlet, at his computer. Enter Polonius:Hamlet's Status

    Polonius: What friends thou hast, add them fast, Lord Hamlet.

    Hamlet: Polonius advises us to link our souls with hoopla,
    When twice this same moon updates us,
    But still to me she hath not chatted.

    Polonius: Light lord, thy status in disconnect must be,
    Causing you this dark and dour distress.

    Hamlet: Fish not, sir; I fear she hath deleted me.
    What post supports this knotted matter?
    False light quickly fades, casting us in dark shadows.
    Let the clouds betide, let the rains come
    So thick and dark not the bark of the ark stays dry.

    Polonius: Despair not, care not, Lord, care less than not.
    Some new compeer will soon light your night
    With comely links and notes bright.
    Light be your aim, Lord, light your audience,
    And this will give light to thee.

    Hamlet: Nay, sir. In this book of faces there is but one for me,
    And I am trapped in this light box like a wench in a nunnery.

    End