Social networking connections are just that – connections
// January 26th, 2010 // Social Networking
Over the weekend, the Sunday Times trailed the latest piece of research by Robin Dunbar, the evolutionary anthropologist of Oxford University.
Dunbar some time ago established an upper limit of 150 friends that the human brain can accommodate – he arrived at this by researching neoloithic societies and contemporary hunter-gatherer communities. You may recognise this from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point in which the Rule of 150 is applied to the effective size of organisations.
Dunbar has now followed this up by looking at traffic on Facebook and found that, beyond 150, we do not actively keep connections up. This is interesting as it strikes me that a lot of digital contact is about just that - contact – rather than about a meaningful communication or friendship. Some people may be comforted by having a vast number of “friends”, “connections” or “followers” but these are likely to be outside the 150 that we can accommodate.
In defence of social networking, many people recommend the ability to get instant answers on just about any question from Twitter. My only foray into social networking in LinkedIn of which I am an advocate (see lozenge on the right of this entry) and I certainly see the value of being able to ask questions of my network.
That reminds me – must update my LinkedIn status with this post….
