Group Sizes and the Internet
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Don't Believe Facebook; You Only Have 150 Friends | Minnesota Public Radio News
GORE-TEX, the company that makes wetsuits, hiking boots and ponchos, is the subject of a famous anecdote in the world of sociology. It centers on the guy who founded the company, Bill Gore. "When Bill Gore set the company up, he set it up in his backyard," Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Oxford, tells NPR's Rachel Martin. Gore wondered why this was. "It was his gut instinct," Dunbar says, "that the bigger a company got, people working for the company were much less likely to work hard and help each other out."
NPR says: Don't Believe Facebook; You Only Have 150 Friends and discusses Dunbar's number. Dunbar says there are some neurological mechanisms in place to help us cope with the ever-growing amount of social connections life seems to require. Humans have the ability, for example, to facially recognize about 1,500 people. Now that would be an impressive number of Facebook friends.
Facebook, Dunbar's Number & Geometry - The Transportationist
Facebook, Dunbar’s Number and current killer apps :: squareCircleZ
British anthropologist Robin Dunbar conducted research in the 1990s on the optimum social network size for primates. It turns out that there is a correlation with neocortex volume – the bigger the brain, the bigger the possible social network. This stands to reason, since being able to recognise faces and to know the pecking order for everyone in the group takes brain power. For humans, Dunbar’s Number is approximately 150. This means that to be able to know each member in a community and to know where they fit in that community, we are limited to about 150 as the community size. Throughout history, 150 has appeared as a fairly common social grouping size in cases like villages and army units where there has been a strong reason (like war) to stay in close physical proximity and work together.
4 users will acquire more and more friends, but the number of replies that they send to other users will increase con- sisten tly only in stable social inte racti ons. Even tually , a point is reac hed where the number of con tacts surpass es the user’s ability to keep in contact with them. This saturation process will necessarily lead to some rela- tionships being more valued than others. Each individual tries to optimize her resources by prioritizing these inter- actio ns. T o quan tify the strength of these inte ract ions, we studied the quantity
Validation of Dunbar's Number in Twitter Conversations
One of Britain’s leading high street banks has been downgraded by the ratings agency Moody’s. Santander UK, which has more than 25 million customers and more than 1,400 branches had its credit rating downgraded together with 16 Spanish banks.
OMG: brains can’t handle all our Facebook friends - Times Online
Online communities in the form of message boards, listservs, and newsgroups continue to represent a considerable amount of the social activity on the Internet. Every year thousands of groups ourish while others decline into relative obscurity; likewise, millions of members join a new community every year, some of whom will come to manage or moderate the conversation while others simply sit by the sidelines and observe. These processes of group formation, growth, and dissolution are central in social science, and in an online venue they have ramifications for the design and development of community software In this paper we explore a large corpus of thriving online communities. These groups vary widely in size, moderation and privacy, and cover an equally diverse set of subject matter. We present a broad range of descriptive statistics of these groups.
Preferential behavior in online groups | cameronmarlow.com
Cameron Marlow | cameronmarlow.com
I am a research scientist and "in-house sociologist" at Facebook.THAT Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks will increase the size of human social groups is an obvious hypothesis, given that they reduce a lot of the friction and cost involved in keeping in touch with other people. Once you join and gather your “friends” online, you can share in their lives as recorded by photographs, “status updates” and other titbits, and, with your permission, they can share in yours. Additional friends are free, so why not say the more the merrier? But perhaps additional friends are not free.
