From the Economist:
Put differently, people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a polling organisation. Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.
The article tries to verify the Dunbar-hypothesis using Facebook numbers. Essentially, from Wikipedia, the Dunbar hypothesis suggests that there is:
Put differently, people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a polling organisation. Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.
The article tries to verify the Dunbar-hypothesis using Facebook numbers. Essentially, from Wikipedia, the Dunbar hypothesis suggests that there is:
... a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.
Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar's number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.
And it arrived at the conclusion: we're not necessarily "more social" - if being social means having more friends, a wider circle of friends... but we are more adept at "advertising" aspects - and minutiae - of our life.
Hmmm.
So why do we go to facebook again?
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