Srikant Sharma's Blog

Are you networking or broadcasting? Stretching the Dunbar Number …

March 6th, 2009

Despite the profusion of online social networking activity – both at the individual level as well as the enterprise level – there appears to be a natural limit on how much interaction with others we can really cope with.  You may have noticed that you have hundreds of “friends” in facebook, and hundreds of more “connections” in LinkedIn, and similar numbers of contacts in a plethora of other forums, BUT, when it comes down to actual interactions, you (unless you are not the typical human) interact with somewhere between 8-12 people on a routine and regular basis.  The number on LinkedIn will tend to higher because of the weaker nature of the relationships, coupled with a highly purpose-driven interaction.

Well, it turn out that this observation that I have had is actually solidly rooted in sound sociological theory.  There is a number called the DUNBAR NUMBER – essentially, Dr. Robin Dunbar, a sociologist / anthropologist from Oxford University postulated that the size of the human brain, particularly the thinking neocortex, limits the size of stable social networks to 148.

While that may be true, the advancement of social computing does make one thing a heck of a lot easier – the automation of social groups, and the ease with which we can follow interactions among our acquaintances that are not in our tighter immediate group, makes it easy for us to expand that Dunbar number.

If I may dare to, I would like to suggest that the expansion of the Dunbar number is facilitated by technology – social computing is likely going to stretch that limitation on my neocortex.  Maybe in a few years they’ll find that Facebook and Twitter junkies have statistically bigger brains – yippee!

Here is an excellent article on this from The Economist > http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13176775

Entry Filed under: Connecting with the customer, Fun