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Human Brain Places Limit On Twitter Friends
Hugh Pickens writes "Back in early '90s, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar began studying human social groups, measuring the number of people an individual can maintain regular contact with, and came up with 150 — a number that appears to be constant throughout human history — from the size of neolithic villages to military units to 20th century contact books. But in the last decade, social networking technology has had a profound influence on the way people connect, vastly increasing the ease with which we can communicate with and follow others, so it's not uncommon for tweeters to follow and be followed by thousands of others. Now Bruno Goncalves has studied the network of links created by three million Twitter users over four years. After counting tweets that are mutual and regular as signifying a significant social bond, he found that when people start tweeting, their number of friends increases to a saturation point until they become overwhelmed. Beyond that saturation point, the conversations with less important contacts start to become less frequent and the tweeters begin to concentrate on the people they have the strongest links with. So what is the saturation point? The answer is between 100 and 200, just as Dunbar predicts. 'This finding suggests that even though modern social networks help us to log all the people with whom we meet and interact,' says Goncalves, 'they are unable to overcome the biological and physical constraints that limit stable social relations (PDF).'"
Without modifying ourselves it's improbable that any technology can change the limits our biological make-up presents.
.: Max Romantschuk
150 twitter 'friends' is equivalent to 150 trillion Facebook friends, because Facebook friends have no value.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
If all humans lived like your rather narrow social circle then maybe that would be relevant.
Averages are tricky. There are a lot of people on this earth who will never own a car. Most of them, in fact. Four does seem very low for the regular car buying American in my opinion.
the monkeysphere! :)
http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
I guess, with twitter and fb, the monkeysphere is expanding, and you cannot cope with it unless the brain is modified
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
For a typical American, I'd agree. As someone living in Europe, I'd say 4 is about right over a lifetime. My wife, who was born and grew up in a major European city (~500k people) did not even get her driver's license until she was 40. She had no need for a car or for driving one, we have something called public transportation. I realize this is a hard concept for Americans to understand (sarcasm aside, I am an American... just living abroad for many years). I actually *gasp* lived abroad without a car for ~5 years. Many people I work with do not own or drive a car, and I live and work in a very technically modern EU country.
If you talk to them on a daily basis, what do you consider that?
Technically, if you have 500 Facebook friends, then every time you update your status you are in contact with 500 people. But Dunbar's number is a measure of the fact that you are not just in contact with people, but know something about them. You'd recognise them, you'd remember their first name if you met them in the street or at work, you have some idea if they're married or single, have kids or not.
It's also a handy indicator of the efficiency of a group. A group of people smaller than Dunbar's number can be updated on the status of all the others quite quickly, probably in a single pass. More than that, and you start getting so many people who are unavailable at any given time, that you need multiple updates to make sure you've reached everybody and the amount of work needed to simply keep everyone informed rises dramatically as a result.
This seems kind of like making the tired point that 'people in Europe travel WAY more than Americans and Americans are durr durr durr durr", which really tends to forget the point that there are plenty of european countries crammed into the size of an American state, while I can drive for six days in a line and still be in the same country and have to cross an ocean to reach anything but North and South America. Likewise, if I lived down the street from where I work, I wouldn't care about a car, either. However, if my employer is on the other side of town, I can't really add four or five hours a day to my commute just for the joy of riding on a bus or light rail filled with smelly homeless people and meth heads shooting up in the back.
I don't have a car (I gave it away). I've never had a license. I have no interest in ever having one. I don't care to drive. I hate driving. I hate traffic. I hate commutes. I'm in a fortunate position where I don't have to worry about such things - but I'm in a very *rare* position.
The Dunbar hypothesis isn't a limit on group size. It argues that an individual can maintain only some 100-200 regular social contacts. Yet if, as the article suggests, a Twitter user stabilizes at a maximum of 150-200 regularly-maintained contacts, they're using up most, if not all, of their Dunbar-space on Twitter alone. So does this mean that people with 150-200 regular Twitter contacts must lose their pre-Twitter real-world regular contacts, or that their pre-Twitter contacts must become Twitter contacts? That seems a bit much to assume without evidence.
I suppose further research will explore how the real-world-and-non-Twitter social life of the twitterati changes as they near their Dunbar limit on Twitter. Perhaps, as the article boldly suggests, "social networks [do] not change human social capabilities" (Conclusions, 7) and the Dunbar limit is indeed resistant to technological circumvention. But this article doesn't make that clear. By not examining the full social space of its subjects, the study does not actually address the possibility that Twitter has increased the number of regular contacts - of all types - that an individual can maintain.
human brains also couldn't deal with speeds over 75mph. human brains adapt, that is the game. under estimating this is total bull
Content + Container; Content = Container; Content â Container... which is the question?
The point is maintaining social contact. 'Knowing about' or 'remembering names' isn't the same as 'regularly speaking to and keeping up-to-date with'.
I was under the impression that twitter friends had the same (lack of) value than Facebook's ...
Write boring code, not shiny code!
You're not alone there tbh. I have around 30 facebook friends, including family members and such, and I interact with about 4 of them on a frequent basis. I simply see no value in trying to "befriend" people whom I have nothing in common, nor do I value pointless chatter that much either. There's no way I could keep up with 150 people.
150 twitter 'friends' is equivalent to 150 trillion Facebook friends, because Facebook friends have no value.
150 twitter friends is equal to one friends phone number.
maybe its just me, but if im not texting-calling you then really we aren't friends, we are acquaintances
http://www.awfullybigmoustache.com
That was Bill Clinton
http://www.awfullybigmoustache.com
I think it's just us, increasingly. Is a Twitter message directed at someone really less personal than an SMS? I see no reason why it should.
Dilbert RSS feed
Some time back, I worked as a retail store manager. One of the things that the company made a point of was that there were studies that indicated that on average people know 250 people well enough to impact their buying decisions. The point they made was that if somebody had a negative experience in your store, it was not just that one person whose sales you might lose as a result. Knowing how some of the other numbers they used got distorted to make whatever point they were pushing, I suspect that somewhere along the line this 150 people number got stretched to 250.
However, having looked at the group dynamics of many organizations over my life time that is the range that fits with my experience. Organizations that are designed to be social interactions for their members tend to divide between 200 and 500, either intentionally or because of internal disputes.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Some even claim notes and dictations are replacing writing, since the idea is the same.
That doesn't make much sense either, does it? RSS has NOTHING to do with a website or it's contents, it's just a format/interface for retrieving it. In fact, you could USE rss to interface to facebook messages!
Read TFA, and it's like watching Fox News.
Correlation doesn't prove anything.
How does the size of military units (specific ones no less, it's not like all military units are the same size) have to do with maintaining stable social circles?
How does real-world social interaction (actual social capital) compare with people you don't know and never met following you on twitter?
You can always find numbers in the world which correlate. The number of galaxies in the universe is about the same as neurons in our brain. Correlation high, significance low.