Numbers and Social networking

Adding Up

Here’s some maths for a Friday morning:

• I’ve got a 246 ‘friends’ (their word) on Facebook. So far this year I’ve interacted with 14 of them. (5.69%)
• I follow 102 people on Twitter, of which, I’ve interacted with 28 in the last two months. That’s just above a quarter.

Now, let’s compute this with some social anthropology. In a study published in 1992, Professor Robin Dunbar, then of University College London, published an article in the Journal of Human Evolution that proposed a theory that came to be known as ‘Dunbar’s Number’.

Here’s how Wikipedia explains Dunbar’s Number:

Dunbar’s number 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. (link to Wikipedia)

Dunbar’s Number was calculated by studying apes, their social networks, and by extrapolating up until he had a relative number for us humans. And if you apply this number of 150 to social media, then the results can be revealing.

Broadly put, our brains can only cope with mental mind mapping for 150 people. So, even if I did nothing else spend my time on Facebook, I still wouldn’t be able to properly follow the activities of all my 246 friends. If you go with Dunbar, it would be biologically impossible.

But if you look at the active numbers of people in either my Facebook or Twitter account, the numbers suddenly become more sensible. 28 on Twitter and just 14 on Facebook (none these, incidentally, overlap). These 42 people constitute my active social media network – a number that I, as a simple primate, can understand.

A bit more maths:

• I have 46 names on my telephone of people that I keep in contact with (I’ve just checked) by telephone or day to day contact and without using social media.
• As I demonstrated earlier I know about 42 people via social media and I, more or less, can understand what they are up to and where they fit in. (88)
• Add to this a collection of family members, office colleagues that I see on a daily basis and other casual contacts that might number around 50 more. (c.138)

Then you are getting something approaching 150. Accuse me of bad maths if you like (I was never any good at it anyway) – but I think that it serves as an interesting approximation.

So what about all the others? The people on Twitter that follow thousands? All the Facebookers with hundreds of friends? The Blip dj’s with scores of listeners? How do they keep up?

The answer is that they don’t. It’s impossible. We just can’t do it. Our brains are not sufficiently well wired to spool a constant stream of information from a vast number of people. But that’s not to say that people haven’t tried.

Jim Connolly and digital burn-out

Social media burn out is a real and dangerous possibility. The most notable example, I think, comes from a marketing specialist named Jim Connolly who went on a famous, high-octane tour of Twitter during the second half of 2008. Connolly’s online marketing strategy was to meet as many people as possible and propel his brand into infinity – and he did this through Twitter.

He followed everyone, and they followed him back. He was polite and useful and helpful and spent vast amounts of time responding to all of his followers’ questions. One quote from his blog notes that:

‘I was amazed to see that even during a fairly quiet period, I was investing an average of 2 and a half hours each day!’

A further quote was even more revealing:

‘The rest of my Twitter time was spent dealing with the hundreds of Direct Messages I get each day and filtering through the hundreds of people who follow me each day; to see from their profile whether or not to follow them back. This is an increasingly time consuming problem, as so many people are now doing that follow / unfollow trick, to attract auto follows and make it look like they have lots of followers.’

Most of the Direct Messages I get on Twitter are people asking me; ‘please share this link with your followers Jim’ or asking me to look at their blog / website and give them some tips. I’m also getting stacks of spam sent to me via Twitter’s Direct Message. This all takes time to review, answer or delete.’

Quite predictably it ended in burn-out. Admirably Connolly held his hands up before his 22,250 followers and declared one day that he couldn’t possibly do it any more. If only Professor Dunbar could have got hold of him, he might have pointed out that it was probably because he was more than 148 times over his golden limit.

Social Media or Broadcast Media?

Let’s not miss the point here. The large numbers of followers, friends, contacts and so on that are associated with social media are, in the main part, to do with advertising and not engagement. Simply put, we are all getting better at broadcasting our own lives. Stephen Fry is an excellent example of this and by most sensible measurements; he is no more  engaged in social media than the Queen is.

Fry is remarkably adept at broadcasting his life to the world – through his Twitter account or through his blog. And whilst he does answer individual Tweets and respond to direct messages, I suspect that any real interaction that he had with the public through social media has long since vanished.

There’s nothing at all wrong with how Fry uses social media, but don’t be mistaken: he uses it to broadcast and effectively manage his fan mail. He’s not a long-term component of an online conversation.

The Economist talks about this:

‘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.’

I want to keep my social media activity useful. I realise that my Facebook account is already a lost cause, but I want to keep my Twittering to the point. To that end I don’t automatically follow everyone who follows me (something I used to do) – I prefer to keep it simple, meaningful and manageable.

Dunbar pointed out that many institutions had been organised around the number 150 – Neolithic villages and the maniples of the Roman Army were notable examples – and it’s good to get some historical perspective. Because, after all, we’re products of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, and despite the fact that social media has arrived with a jolt in a few sharp years – we still firmly live in a world where it is impossible to have seven hundred friends.

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Image from Flickr