Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Reaction to "Dunbar number" hype
The recent finding that Facebook members communicate regularly with a very small group is not surprising. Sites such as Facebook exist to keep track of a range of friendships, which some have taken to be a test of an online Dunbar Number. There are number of reasons why this is a difficult comparison to make. As danah boyd succinctly discusses, there are a number of reasons why the “Dunbar number” simply does not apply to online relationships. It is a theoretical number based in the real world, describes “grooming” activities by primates, and was developed from observations by anthropologists in non-first-world countries. And, of course, Facebook connections do not capture the entire range of social connections of an individual, just the connections on a single site. Even if you accept that a “Dunbar number” exists online (to play devil's advocate), this does not disprove the utility of these sites.
Many SNS connections are ultra “loose ties” that would seem to fall outside of the purview of a Dunbar number, while others are connections with close friends or family. My personal feeling is that even loose ties can come into more central play in a person’s life through these sites over time, regardless of whether these friendships began online or offline. There are a number of reasons that people may productively use SNSs to maintain large groups of extremely loose ties. These are friends from work or around town that may emerge as close ties at a point in the future, business “contacts” that are not friendship-related but need to be maintained, and individuals who used to be close ties but now have fallen out of favor due to geographic limitations (such as the classic old school buddies).
People gain personal satisfaction, financial security, and community benefit from online socialization with online groups. These groups have very tangible beneficial effects, and tie groups of close-tie groups together, providing valuable “bridging” that facilitates propagation of ideas. These sites are also increasingly a platform for other activities, including bona fide applications that expand the reach of SNSs beyond text and images, a convergence of activities as well as socializations.
Why individuals only interact consistently with a small number of friends can be explained, in part, by Facebook's filtering. Filtering is a key part of social promotion, without which it would be difficult to harness the “wisdom of crowds.” Facebook recognizes the people you communicate the most with, and promote their news feed items above those of others. This is completely natural utility – why would you want to have daily updates from someone you haven’t spoken with in ten years? Unless of course, you renew your friendship and start to interact more with them, at which point Facebook would recognize the increased activity. And you are always free to select “I want to see less from [user]” in the feeds. Even if people are exposed to an over abundance of messages from online “friends,” I doubt this can be shown to contribute to a meaningful negative effect. This “overload hypothesis” is frequently promoted by the media as a death by distraction (so to speak), making bugaboos of everything from cell phones to email. Never mind that if you show someone too much information, they simply do not retain everything, only what they frequently access or are useful in their life. Excess information is not retained, mentally urinated out like an excess of water-soluble vitamins.
Many SNS connections are ultra “loose ties” that would seem to fall outside of the purview of a Dunbar number, while others are connections with close friends or family. My personal feeling is that even loose ties can come into more central play in a person’s life through these sites over time, regardless of whether these friendships began online or offline. There are a number of reasons that people may productively use SNSs to maintain large groups of extremely loose ties. These are friends from work or around town that may emerge as close ties at a point in the future, business “contacts” that are not friendship-related but need to be maintained, and individuals who used to be close ties but now have fallen out of favor due to geographic limitations (such as the classic old school buddies).
People gain personal satisfaction, financial security, and community benefit from online socialization with online groups. These groups have very tangible beneficial effects, and tie groups of close-tie groups together, providing valuable “bridging” that facilitates propagation of ideas. These sites are also increasingly a platform for other activities, including bona fide applications that expand the reach of SNSs beyond text and images, a convergence of activities as well as socializations.
Why individuals only interact consistently with a small number of friends can be explained, in part, by Facebook's filtering. Filtering is a key part of social promotion, without which it would be difficult to harness the “wisdom of crowds.” Facebook recognizes the people you communicate the most with, and promote their news feed items above those of others. This is completely natural utility – why would you want to have daily updates from someone you haven’t spoken with in ten years? Unless of course, you renew your friendship and start to interact more with them, at which point Facebook would recognize the increased activity. And you are always free to select “I want to see less from [user]” in the feeds. Even if people are exposed to an over abundance of messages from online “friends,” I doubt this can be shown to contribute to a meaningful negative effect. This “overload hypothesis” is frequently promoted by the media as a death by distraction (so to speak), making bugaboos of everything from cell phones to email. Never mind that if you show someone too much information, they simply do not retain everything, only what they frequently access or are useful in their life. Excess information is not retained, mentally urinated out like an excess of water-soluble vitamins.
Labels: anthropology, communication, facebook, SNS, social networking, socialnetworking
Comments:
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I think there is a middle ground and I presented a little of it in the comments of the Economist article.
Over there I wrote:
"My understanding of Dunbar's number is that it is the number of people that you can keep track of, in your mind. About 150 people sound about right.Now, using a rolodex, an address book, or especially some good social networking sites, you can keep track of many more people. What the real limit of that is, I'm not sure, but it probably has more to do with available time and software than it does with the neocortex.Us computer people are used to the idea of how many things can be kept in memory, and how much needs to get swapped out to disk.At the other end of the spectrum, just because you can keep 150 people in mind at the same time, and perhaps thousands on a social network, doesn't mean you can carry on conversations with all of them at the same time.It seems, from the research listed that you can really only carry on a dozen or two concurrent conversations."
I've written a lot more about Dunbar's number, for example, me post A Digital Dunbar's Number. I've also written about it other times on the social networks section of my blog.
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Over there I wrote:
"My understanding of Dunbar's number is that it is the number of people that you can keep track of, in your mind. About 150 people sound about right.Now, using a rolodex, an address book, or especially some good social networking sites, you can keep track of many more people. What the real limit of that is, I'm not sure, but it probably has more to do with available time and software than it does with the neocortex.Us computer people are used to the idea of how many things can be kept in memory, and how much needs to get swapped out to disk.At the other end of the spectrum, just because you can keep 150 people in mind at the same time, and perhaps thousands on a social network, doesn't mean you can carry on conversations with all of them at the same time.It seems, from the research listed that you can really only carry on a dozen or two concurrent conversations."
I've written a lot more about Dunbar's number, for example, me post A Digital Dunbar's Number. I've also written about it other times on the social networks section of my blog.
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