Stretched thin
Cobb questions one particular benchmark of life online:
According to Facebook, I have 501 friends. (According to Levi, I have 501 jeans.) According to Dunbar, I can only maintain real relationships with 100-150 or so of them. If you want to know the honest to God truth, I think I have about 3, excluding my immediate family. A friend is somebody who comes whenever you call, according to me right now. According to Twitter, I have 150 followers, but I inflate. On none of these scales do I come remotely close to Tiger Woods.
Cobb being a sensible fellow, I figured I should check out Dunbar, and this was the first thing I found:
Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.
I think my own capacity for such things is probably a bit lower than that. I can keep track of people fairly well, after a fashion, but I’m also a great fan of distance, as in keeping a certain amount of it.
And life online, I think, demands a separate tier of social relationships, simply because it presumes, for that distance, a different vector. There’s some serious question in my mind as to whether an obsession with someone 1100 miles away counts the same as an obsession with someone 11 miles away. (Numbers chosen for illustration only: do not assume a Great Secret can be revealed with a couple of Google Maps.)
Then again, anyone can follow anyone on Twitter for any reason; Facebook expects you to verify your friends. And I have five times as many Twitter followers as Facebook friends. On the other hand, I’ve been on Twitter five times as long.
Donna B. »
22 February 2010 · 5:05 pm
There’s something mutual about Facebook that escapes me on Twitter. I really didn’t like the idea of strangers following me… and didn’t like the conversations between two people I *know* but had no idea what they were talking about.
I’d much rather eavesdrop on strangers’ conversations at a bookstore. I don’t feel any need to understand.