Are we evolving the ability to have bigger social networks?

Good old CBC. I was listening to a Rewind (where they play radio documentaries from God knows when to fill air time) on the subject of Hutterites. Hutterites, if you’re not Manitoban, are a communal, agrarian, pacifist religious group who live in colonies, raise pigs & sell eggs. What’s so social media about that, you wonder?

Well, I was struck by the doc’s revelation that when Hutterite colonies reach 150 members, they split off into a daughter colony. Upwards of 150 members, and the communities found that factioning and cliques played havoc with their carefully-maintained social system. Some people had to be removed from the equation to keep the peace.

The 150 limit happens to be the much-bandied-in-social media-circles Dunbar Number: the theoretical cognitive limit, determined by the size of our neocortex, to the amount of stable social relationships humans can maintain. Hutterite colonies seem to bear out Dunbar’s idea.

If we’re physically limited by the size of our brains to 150 real relationships, what does this mean for overfriending in social networks? I’m curious about a tipping point that may push people away from social networking. Are we mentally capable of the task of feeding hundreds of relationships?

Weak and strong ties are apples and oranges

We can “beat” the Dunbar limit and get preferential inclusion in people’s groups by being super useful, promoting ourselves as important parts of the network and rising in esteem, pushing less “useful” people into ambiance. Alternatively, we can seek to be so niche that we’re sought out transiently as part of a curated group when our particular expertise matters. That leads to opportunities without the attention demanded by full-time strong ties.

But through social media we can now form hundreds of weak ties that provide access to new thinking.

In a study by Leigh Thompson from Kellogg School of Management, it was determined that “open groups”, in which creative brainstorming was carried out with fresh members routinely added to the mix, produced more innovation than “closed groups” with the same members. A greater variety of unique ideas are generated by rotating your connections and expanding outside your 150.

Weak ties, in mathematical sociology, introduce more novel information. This is the value of Twitter.

The mere use of technology allows us to outsource our mental social landscape. A few clicks tells you what mutual friends you have in common with someone. Our brains now have external hard drives. Cognition limits may be circumventable at this juncture in human history.

Language is getting simplified

Dunbar proposed that language may have evolved as a “cheaper” form of social grooming, allowing humans to get on with their lives while still recognizing and reassuring each other of our social importance. Computerized text-based language is even cheaper; we strip out body language, tone of voice, and focused attention (eye contact), and bang off 140 characters to fulfill each other’s phatic needs. This low-cost social recognition may facilitate the growth our social sphere past neocortical limits.

Bruce Lahn, PhD, of the University of Chicago was the lead researcher on two papers in the mid-2000′s that indicated the human brain is still evolving in size and complexity. “Our environment and the skills we need to survive in it are changing faster then we ever imagined. I would expect the human brain, which has done well by us so far, will continue to adapt to those changes,” said the geneticist. The size limitations placed on our social spheres by brain size may dissolve as we adapt to greater connectivity.

If the network fits…

I asked an (actual) friend with almost 1000 Facebook connections if he felt harrassed by the amount of noise & people he’s paying attention to, or is the quality of the attention so dispersed that it’s easy to know stuff about so many people at once. I suspected it was 80/20, that a small percentage (around 200, approximately Dunbar) were doing most of the interaction.

“I was brought up to be social.” he said. “On a daily basis, I probably spend no more than 15 minutes on Facebook. I make it a point to message at least one person a day and reply to all my emails and wall posts. I would consider myself close friends with no more than 60 people on my friends list (and that includes family). I do not feel overwhelmed.”

“I actually purge people I have met if I hit 1000 friends.” His psychological and practical comfort level online hovers around a thousand people, about 6.5 times the Dunbar number.

A sense of overfriending is a function of expectation

Expectations in relationship strength are key to pleasurable social networking. If you regard Facebook as a place to keep in touch with your family and good friends, you’re going to be uncomfortable when your boss friends you.

Social media needs to be designed to explicitly foster strong or weak ties to manage etiquette breaches and social discomfort.

Notwithstanding fads and the network effect that keep people using the platform where their connections already are, niche networks that cater to weak and strong ties, or at least divide them adequately, will exist and be popular simultaneously.

Humans need a few kinds of places to interact. And yes, that includes social networks for Hutterites.

Is location awareness too creepy to catch on?

Photo by jefield | Flickr Creative Commons | CC BY 2.0

I know, I know, I’m an enigma wrapped in a riddle. On the one hand I love social networking, work in social media marketing, and check in with Foursquare. On the other, I’m righteously indignant that Facebook insists on publishing my fan pages and friends list to make a buck. I think geolocation is so cool, but I’m worried that we’re cutting down the privacy forest faster than the hairy-legged tree planters of social convention can reseed it. If there’s no trees, we’ll all be able to see each other going to the bathroom.

Wired experimented with it, arming one poor writer with an armada of GPS-enabled tech & watching his psychological breakdown. Mashable terrified us with it, making us consider the looming specter of personal injury & property loss. Location sharing is the big cool thing for 2010. But is location awareness just TMI for the careful constrains of society as we know it?

It’s weird on a fundamental level to think that one day soon you might be found, contacted, hassled, marketed to, located at any time. People like time off. People need to pull the covers over their head at some point during the day and say “enough”. Blackberries, cell phones, the ominous eye of the Google Streetview car, all intrude on our personal domain and connect us, however inconveniently at times, to other people.

It’s not just that people know what movies you like and what pages you’re a fan of. The new location-aware web will let them know where you literally are. How to get to you at all times.

This is more than a breach of a general sense of decorous privacy. This is an encroachment into our most personal resource, our time. Our attention, our thoughts, are diverted, captured, required by others. A rising sense of panic accompanies the sensation you might never be alone again. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh no. Facebook appears to be the Antichrist.

Don your tinfoil helmets, oh friended ones, and wrap your conspiracy theories around this…

Facebook celebrated their 6th birthday by announcing their network now boasts 400 million souls, or almost 6% of the earth’s population. Facebook’s birthday is February 4th…02/04..2+4 is—gulp—6! If you’re slow with math, that’s three big fat 6′s in a row.

Oh my. Let’s bust out the Bible and see what it has to say about this.

Daniel 8:23-25
And through his policy also he shall cause deceit to prosper in his hand…

Could that refer to a privacy policy, possibly the one that roped in millions of users who never dreamed their friend lists would one day be made public? A policy that, once we had unstoppable group inertia* due to our elderly parents making likely their only leap to social networking, then changed to make way for better search results and advertising revenues? Gosh, I hope not.

Daniel 7:24-27
And he shall speak great words against the most High…and think to change times and laws.

Ok, if “he” is Mark Zuckerberg and “the most High” is the American Constitution (specifically, the Fourth Amendment, guarding against “unreasonable searches” and protecting “a reasonable expectation of privacy”) and the “times” he’d  like to change are the famous social norms regarding privacy, am I painting a scary enough picture for you yet? But wait…

Revelation 13:3-18
And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the Mark.

Gartner Research predicts that by 2012—the end of the freaking Mayan calendar—”Facebook will lead the pack in developing the distributed, interoperable social Web through Facebook Connect and similar mechanisms. The interoperability will be critical to survival of other social networks. Other social networks (including Twitter) will continue to develop…However, they will all revolve around Facebook.” In other words Facebook will control the universe. The universe may or may not include your disposable income.

Alrighty then. Nothing to panic about. We knew the end times were probably upon us anyway. Let him that hath understanding reckon the number of the beast. Hopefully this newfound prophetic clarity is a balm for those souls chapped about controlling their own information. Let it help you accept your fate with grace. I, for one, welcome our new Social Overlords. Happy Birthday, Facebook!

*Group inertia, or social inertia, is the critical mass attained when everyone you could possibly care about joins a social network, making it tough to leave lest they not follow to “the next big thing”.

A day without Facebook, or ‘What’s that bright light in the sky?’

Happy Data Privacy Day! A day to relax with family and friends IRL, ponder your digital fingerprint and maybe grill a few Tofurkey sausages.

I’m celebrating Data Privacy Day by staying offline for 24 hours. By “offline”, I mean “not on Facebook”, lest you think I have magic analogue blogging powers. I’m  temporarily defecting from the Big F, as a conscientious objection to its recent bait and switch privacy shenanigans. 24 hours logged out of the world’s most popular social network. I can totally do that. It’s just one little website.

Bleary this morning without my usual cup of decaf (I’m whitening), my mouse moves automatically toward the little blue and white ‘f’ icon in my bookmarks toolbar. Whoa! I think, barely deflecting the click in time. Let’s visit somewhere else. Twitter, perhaps. Twitter use doesn’t strike me as contrary to the spirit of Privacy Day, because despite the fact that it’s actually more publicly searchable, I use it for business and it contains no pictures of me drinking beer.

In support of my Privacy Day tweet, I google* “Data Privacy Day”. The second search result is a Facebook page. Ubiquitous little bugger, that Facebook. I neatly avoid that particular link and go on about my day.

On the road, I wonder how my husband’s convergent media panel at ALL ACCESS: The Digital Incubator is going. Normally I’d Facebook him and see what was shaking. Unlocking my iPhone and heading for the blue square is almost one smooth motion; again I brake and consider my other communication options. I’m not going to phone him, for Pete’s sake. What’s this “messages” icon? Huh. I suppose I could text him. That would actually be faster. Ok. Read the rest of this entry »

Unreasonably searching: Is privacy uncool, and are we cool with that?

When I was youngster, our house was on a party line with another house across the dusty gravel road. The phone would ring one long for our house, two short for theirs. You answered it if it was for you. You could pick it up at any time and hear—heck, participate in—the conversation of anyone else on the line. Party lines functioned on respect, the honour system, and general good-neighbourliness.

My 8-year-old conversations didn’t have a whole lot of scandalous content such as might impact my future personal brand, but it was a pretty weird situation. That level of personal space invasion would be intolerable today. Within the same household, within the same family we all have our own phones. We hold our communications cards close to our chest. I squint with suspicion when my iPod picks up next door’s wifi network. What kind of person names their network Afrosizzle?

Facebook’s been making some big headlines with their new privacy settings, which include forced exposure of some previously private stats (name, gender, home town, your list of friends). This is ostensibly to appease Canada’s Privacy Commission, although completely removing the ability to hide your associations and personal details can’t be what the ole’ CPC had in mind. Read the rest of this entry »

The great Facebook unfriending: Ow my feelings!

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, & the social media that fulfill 'em. Biggie size available on Flickr.

Prologue: Today the New Oxford American Dictionary announced “unfriend” is the 2009 Word of the Year. May it not be a portent of things to come.

Gird yourself for a mortifying tale of techno treachery, friends. Girded?

Ok. In my weekly perusal of Facebook friend’s friends to see who I might be missing being friends with (it’s an orgy of friendship up in here), I came across an ex-coworker who I just adore. We’ve been Facebook friends forever, since that first blissful wave of friendings back in the 1980′s. I thought “I shall be sociable and leave him a wall howdy!”, and scrolled through my friend list to find him. How nice of me, spreading wall sunshine. Scroll scroll. Wait. What the heck. He. Wasn’t. There.

Like dropping your laptop in the bathtub (both personally dismaying and electrically imprudent), a cold shock of disbelief rippled through my being. It appeared, I cringed, that I had been UNFRIENDED.

Ouch.

Now, I could have assimilated the sting of rejection and got on with my life had this been your run of the mill Facebook-friend-you-don’t-really-know-but-they-know-your-other-friend-and-you-met-them-once-outside-Starbucks kind of thing, but this was an actual capital-F Friend. Someone I like! Someone whose positivity and energy shines through their status updates like the glint off a unicorn’s horn! What went so very wrong that he couldn’t at least just “hide” me? Read the rest of this entry »

A wired Halloween

Were they out? Lazy? Afraid of H1N1? Trying to encourage H1N1? Photo by Winnipegger & social networking star Ken Bond.

Did anyone else have, like, a really communal experience on Halloween? Not being a religious or family-get-together-heavy holiday (ie one parent at least has to stay home and be on candy duty), a lot of my social network were online. In the days of yore when we lived with our extended families and knew all our neighbours, that might not have mattered so much (and also would have been impossible, because the days of yore didn’t have the internet). But the solo urban existence we’ve got going now can be kind of isolating. Facebook broke down that barrier for me this year. Read the rest of this entry »

Ambient anxiety: meme spreadage and social search

Search engines like Google and Bing are racing to include real-time, “social” search results in their products. This means when you search for something, results connected to your friends will be displayed along with the kind of results you’re used to. The idea is you might find the opinions and resources of your friends more pertinent, or equally interesting, at least, as results from around the general web.

This will probably prove to be pretty neat, ultimately connecting us to our networks a little bit more. You’ll find out who among your friends is a good photographer, or writer, or really opinionated online and maybe where to get good coffee or the scoop on a shoe sale. On a local level that could be quite useful. It’s natural for people to trust peer recommendations – PR giant Edelman determined that “trust in “a person like me” increased from 20% in 2003 to 68% today”. Customer experience may adjust upwards accordingly, because word-of-mouth will be even more quickly and widely disseminated. Social proof—what “everybody’s” doing or saying—is awfully influential stuff, as marketers know. Read the rest of this entry »

Why is Facebook telling everyone to write on my wall?

So went the status update of my brother-in-law, as his wall swelled with “Facebook told me to take pity on you and throw you a few crumbs of human contact” messages. I saw these olive branches when I, too, went there to leave him a little virtual high-five. I also noticed my great aunt is only “70% active”, whatever that might mean, and I wondered what social activity graph was being attached to my name out there in the ether. What’s the sweet spot between “I just come here to check my birthday wishes” and “I post 300 links a day because I’m 17 and work retail”? Am I a “100%” supernerd, my sad eagerness for conversation now painfully transparent? Read the rest of this entry »