The Social Network: Ecosystem vs. Egosystem. InShare55 Of all the social networks competing for our online persona and social graph, Twitter is special. The culture and self-governing rules of engagement shaped by the “me” in social media, create a personalized experience that looks and feels less like a “social” network and instead, creates an empowering information exchange. Twitter is at the heart of the Web’s evolving egosystem and its archetype is powerful and quite understated. For better or worse, Twitter introduces the notion of notion of popularity, whereby the numbers of followers and also the friend to follower ratio we possess indicate ones stature within Twitterverse. As I’ve said over the years, popularity does not beget influence, but the egosystem and all who define it, do in fact reward and nurture it. The Illusion of Control and Influence Action… Actions speak louder than words and as such, we earn and retain the relationships we deserve.
Influence is the ability to inspire and measure action. Tags: What Influences the Size of Groups in Which Primates Choose to Live? | Learn Science at Scitable. Abernethy, K. A., White, L. J. T. & Wickings, E. J. Hordes of mandrills (Mandrillus sphinx): Extreme group size and seasonal male presence. Alexander, R. Aureli, F. et al. Borries, C. Borries, C. et al. Chapman, C. Chapman, C. Chapman, C. Chapman, C. Chapman, C. Chapman, C. Chapman, C. Chapman, C. Cody, M. Crockett, C. Dunbar, R. Ganas, J. & Robbins, M. Hamilton, W. Harris, T. & Chapman, C. Janson, C. Janson, C. Kappeler, P. Koenig, A. Koenig, A. & Borries, C. Koenig, A. et al. Onderdonk, D. Snaith, T. Snaith, T. Snaith, T. Snaith, T. Steenbeek, R.
& van Schaik, C. Teichroeb, J. Teichroeb, J. Population size, density, urbanization and the ... [Calif Sociol. 1982. Beyond the Dunbar Number: Picking Dunbar's Brain. By Filip Matous Kinship vs. friendship, the cognitive demands of monogamy, or why 400 Facebook friends may be a health hazard. In 1992, anthropologist and evolutionary biologist Robin Dunbar proposed Dunbar’s Number — a theoretical cognitive limit on the number of people with whom we can maintain viable social relationships. He pinned that number at 148, or roughly 150. But how does this translate to today’s social media environment of 400-friend Facebook profiles — does it help us beat Dunbar’s number?
We asked the iconic British social anthropologist himself, who addresses the issue further in his new book, How Many Friends Does One Person Need? The amount of time we invest in a relationship is proportionate to its quality. If you don’t go to the pub sooner or later, it will die.” ~ Dunbar But what of all those huge numbers of online friends, aren’t they worth something? Dunbar argues that having lots of kin means having fewer friends. Hold on, someone just tweeted me… Share on Tumblr. Issues in Community: Size.
How much does size matter in community? The community I helped found in North Cambridge never had more than five or six adults (plus two children), and FEC groups like Sandhill Farm (currently seven adults and one child) and the Emma Goldman Finishing School in Seattle (currently eight adults) are relatively small. My belief is that you need at least four members to have a functioning community. There are joys about living in a small community (closer connections, for example) and difficulties (closer connections, for example). My experience is that the smaller a community is, the more intense it can get. On the other hand, communities can be fairly large. In my recent post Connected (2/3/13), I mentioned 'Dunbar's number', which the authors said was the optimal size for social groups, around 150 members.
Acorn has also decided that they don't want to have any more than the thirty odd members that they have. Certainly communities function differently at different sizes. Effects of Group Size on Problem Solving. Are individuals or groups better at solving problems? According to one study, groups of three to five people perform better than individuals when solving complex problems.
The research, published in the April issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggests that groups of three people are able to solve difficult problems better than even the best individuals working alone. Researchers had 760 student participants from the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign solve letters-to-numbers code problems, working either individually or as part of a group. The study notes that there is a surprisingly small amount of research on the effect of group size on problem solving. In an April 23, 2006 APA press release, lead researcher Patrick Laughlin attributed the improved performance of groups to "the ability of people to work together to generate and adopt correct responses, reject erroneous responses, and effectively process information. " Bonner, B. Bray, R. Hill, G. Is Your Team Too Big? Too Small? What's the Right Number? When it comes to athletics, sports teams have a specific number of team players: A basketball team needs five, baseball nine, and soccer 11.
But when it comes to the workplace, where teamwork is increasingly widespread throughout complex and expanding organizations, there is no hard-and-fast rule to determine the optimal number to have on each team. Should the most productive team have 4.6 team members, as suggested in a recent article on “How to Build a Great Team” in Fortune magazine? What about naming five or six individuals to each team, which is the number of MBA students chosen each year by Wharton for its 144 separate learning teams? Is it true that larger teams simply break down, reflecting a tendency towards “social loafing” and loss of coordination?
Or is there simply no magic team number, a recognition of the fact that the best number of people is driven by the team’s task and by the roles each person plays? Each Person Counts Second, she says, “what is the team composition? Dunbar's number. Dunbar and ideal group sizes. The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes. Lately I've been noticing the spread of a meme regarding "Dunbar's Number" of 150 that I believe is misunderstanding of his ideas. The Science of Dunbar's Number Dunbar is an anthropologist at the University College of London, who wrote a paper on Co-Evolution Of Neocortex Size, Group Size And Language In Humans where he hypothesizes: ... there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships, that this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size ... the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.
Dunbar supports this hypothesis through studies by a number of field anthropologists. Source: Boston Consulting Group Revisiting Dunbar's Number Dunbar's theory is that this 42% number would be true for humans if humans had not invented language, a "cheap" form of social grooming. Ross Mayfield's Weblog. Terra/Lycos Blog Builder Lycos launches its ad campaign today for blog.tripod.lycos.com, the first of many majors to enter blogspace.
Their What is a Blog page says: "Blogs are text based and no HTML is required to set them up or to edit them -- just fill out a form! " Makes it sound like something I want to do with my time. Excerpts from a WSJ article on the mainstreaming of blogspace: ...Terra Lycos, based in Spain, hopes the new service will drive growth in subscribers to its paid Tripod service, which charges $4.95 to $19.95 a month and offers other features such as Web publishing tools, e-mail accounts and domain names. "Terra Lycos wants to step out front ahead of Yahoo in getting blogging as a core feature for users," said Greg Bloom, a senior analyst with Nielsen//NetRatings (a vendor to Lycos). An AOL spokesman said the company is looking to introduce a blog product, with a "spring timeframe. " ...Mr. Terra Lycos hopes that many of its users will sample the new product. Mr. Community by the Numbers, Part III: Power Laws.
In my first article in this series I talked about community numbers: how the sizes of groups ultimately affect their success (or failure). However what I discussed only offers up the most rudimentary explanation of the dynamics, and that is because typically not all of the members of a group are equally involved. In order to better define who constitutes the tightly-knit "participant community" upon which the group thresholds act, we have to study power laws which let us measure the intensity of individuals' involvement in a group. An Overview of Power Laws The best-known power law is probably the Pareto principle, which is otherwise known as the "80/20 law.
" It's been overused throughout the years; Pareto's actual law only said that 80% of the wealth would be held by 20% of the population. However, it offers a fine example of how power laws work. Power Laws & Group Thresholds When I wrote about tightly-knit communities in my first article, I didn't consider the degree of participation. Community by the Numbers, Part II: Personal Circles. In my previous post, I talked about the limits on sizes of tightly-knit communities. These group limits are closely related to a number of interesting personal limits, and are often confused with them.
Unlike the group limits, personal limits actually measure something different: the number of connections that an individual can hold. They're yet another thing that you must consider when thinking about communities of people. Personal Limits The Support Circle: This is the number of individuals that you seek advice, support, or help from in times of severe emotional or financial stress. In most societies, the average size of an individual's Support Circle is 3-5. The people are the core of your intimate social network and most typically are also kin. The Sympathy Circle: This is larger then the Support Circle — it is the number of people that you go to for sympathy and also those people whose death would be devastating to you.
The Emotional Circle The Familiar Stranger Crossing the Circles. Community by the Numbers, Part One: Group Thresholds. We often think of communities as organic creatures, which come into existence and grow on their own. However, the truth is they are fragile blossoms. Although many communities surely germinate and bloom on their own, purposefully creating communities can take a tremendous amount of hard work, and one factor their success ultimately depends upon is their numbers.
If a community is too small you'll often have insufficient critical mass to sustain it. Conversely, if it's too large you can end up with a community that's too noisy, too cliquey, or otherwise problematic. These optimal and sub-optimal community sizes appear in strata, like discrete layers of rock. For a community to advance from one strata to the next often takes immense energy.
We can analyze these community sizes in three ways. Though I'm going to point to some studies which support these numbers, in general my goal here isn't to try and prove this theory of community size numbers, but rather to lay the theory out completely. Dunbar Triage: Too Many Connections. As someone who now has over 171 professional "connections" in my LinkedIn Profile, 198 "friends" on Orkut, many more non-intersecting friends and acquaintances on Tribe.Net, LiveJournal, and other social networking services, as well as a plethora of correspondents that I only interact with via email, I am trying reconcile a mismatch between my connections and my own Dunbar Number.
How do I maintain meaningful relationships with over 300 people? Venture Capitalist Jeff Nolan relates similar concerns: "It strikes me that the social networking theory holds that the more volume you have, the bigger your network will become by introducing degrees of separation roughly along the lines of Metcalfe's Law. I disagree, human networks do not grow in value by multiplying, but rather by reduction. For me, it's the quality of relationships that enhances my professional and personal life, not the sheer numbers.
" I offer here the beginning of that discussion. The Cultural Strategies What's your solution?