Dunbar Had A Point
Dunbar’s Number is 150.
From Wikipedia:
Proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, it indicates the “cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships”.
Thanks to popular social networking services like Twitter, Facebook, etc., users can communicate with others much more efficiently. Before this technology, an avid socialite would have a limit to the number of people he or she could communicate with. Now, there is no limit. On Twitter, the “whales” (people with large numbers of contacts) have thousands of followers. On Facebook, they are hitting the maximum limit of 4,999 friends. With high efficiency communication platforms, there is practically no limit to the number of people a “popular” individual can communicate with.
What happens to someone when they talk to thousands of people at a time? If you wait in line to talk to this person or if you are a small voice in a large crowd of people clamoring for the attention of this person, are you going to be able to have a meaningful interaction? With all the noise, will you have a strong enough signal to hold a conversation of much significance?
November 4th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
Shouldn’t “# of people…” be on the x-axis? Y’know for technical correctification
November 4th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
@Hadyn: Ah, but then it wouldn’t be a crappy graph, now would it?
November 4th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
You definitely should take a look at my series of articles on the Dunbar Number, starting with http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html and in particular the followup article on the quantitative results from World of Warcraft groups http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2005/10/dunbar_group_co.html
November 4th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
Man, this is a crappy graph.
November 4th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
I was about to say…
The value of interactions should definitely be on the y-axis.
November 4th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
You’ve got a point there, though I haven’t thought that could be possible. But I believe that even when you’re very popular in social networking, that doesn’t mean that you talk to everyone, I’m an example. I can add as friends many people who request that to me, but if I don’t want to answer their questions, leave comments on their profiles, or try to contact them in some other way, how can I say (truly) that I’m ‘connected’ to them? I’m not supposed to. I can’t truly say that I know that person or that they know me. We are only related because. That doesn’t mean we know each other entirely. We may have followers on Twitter, but unnecessarily have to talk to them or befriend with them, most like when someone introduces another person and we never see them again.