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.