Friendster as neocortical prosthetic...
I've been reading connected selves on the 150 person limit for weak ties and its relationship to Friendster:
"When i have 200+ friends on a site like Friendster, i'm not a social networks anomaly. What is actually being revealed is that my articulated network goes beyond the relationships that i currently maintain. While a high percentage of my friends and associates are on Friendster, not all of them are. There are quite a few relationships that i currently maintain that are not represented there. Additionally, many of the relations represented are outdated or on hiatus, not because i don't love or appreciate those people, but because we are not geographically colocated or our personal situations have created a situation where time to connect is limited. This doesn't mean that i don't love and appreciate those people, just that they're not part of my current situation."
Particularly that early phrase, "I'm not a social networks anomaly", intrigued me. The assumption seems to be that Friendster just reveals our social networks - uncovers them - and that we had to explain away those circumstances where it seemed to indicate that human beings were managing more than 150 weak ties. This seems odd to me - surely Friendster is actually a mechanism by which we might outstrip the limits imposed by the size and power of the primate neocortex. I can't find a copy of the classic RIM Dunbar article online anywhere, but I did find an article on Neocortex as a constraint on group size in antelopes in which the author, Peter Taylor, specifically says:
"Social animals group size is not limited by environment or feeding behaviour, but by neocortex size. Social life requires the mental capacity to process relationships and social standing. Therefore bigger groups require a bigger 'computer' in order to process all the group information. When the group size increases over the computational capacity the group fractures into smaller more stable numbers."
It would be cheap to draw a direct parallel between the language he uses to describe our social-network-management wet-ware ('computer') and social software online, but I think there are some intriguing and fairly obvious parallels between the kind of information that we use our neocortices to process and the information we try to incorporate into our online social tools - reputation management being the obvious example. This idea of social software and online community software as a prosthetic is one I've articulated before but I think this is the most clearly I've seen it expressed...
Addendum: There's a really interesting post in a similar vein on confusedkid.com too.
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
Prairie dogs. That's my rebuttal.
"Prairie dogs live in large colonies that are also called towns or villages. Undisturbed colonies have thousands of residents and extend for miles in all directions. Within colonies, prairie dogs live in family groups called coteries. Each coterie defends a home territory of about one acre (.40 hectare) from surrounding coteries. The typical coterie territory contains about 70 burrow entrances." - National Geographic
Doubtful prairie dogs have a proportionally larger neocortex in comparison to other mammals.
I would interested in looking at through-put between brain hemispheres. I'd also be interested in any studies of on-line relationship capacities (versus F2F) by humans with Asperger's; it's possible that the internet permits better relations as an augmentation to diminished capacity of right-brain function or diminished through-put.
→ Posted by: Rayne at September 10, 2003 8:02 PM
I am new to the whole 'is Friendster' good or bad discussion. Also, i think you are too intelligent. and i'm not sure i am able to figure out whether you think friendster is a good thing or not based on your text. maybe you could provide a more personal account.
my reaction to friendster is here:
http://www.coldbacon.com/friendster.html
→ Posted by: Cold Bacon at September 11, 2003 2:23 AM
Social software architecture + neuroceuticals = Forecasting Happiness
http://www.corante.com/brainwaves/20030901.shtml#51882
→ Posted by: Zack Lynch at September 11, 2003 4:56 AM
The 150 likely comes from the social network "rule of 150". You can read more about this in Malcolm Gladwell's book entitled "The Tipping Point". The idea basically is that humans can't really effectively maintain quality relationships in groups larger than 150 people. This idea has ruled things like the size of army divisions and the office sizes at the makers of GoreTex.
→ Posted by: benry at September 12, 2003 5:19 AM
Yeah, benry, it's the "quality" part that seems most important to me (or perhaps "intensity" is a better word)
→ Posted by: Jean at September 13, 2003 5:21 AM
The origins of the concept are in the RIM Dunbar article that Gladwell and many others have subsequently talked about. I fully understand that there's an issue about the quality of connections maintained, but the principle remains - is it possible to augment the social aspects of our being with some kind of outboard prosthesis? I would argue that it is - and I'll give an example of something like the IM buddy list, which allows individuals to 'feel' the 'presence' of their friends even when they're not having active discussion with them and when they're not co-located. That sense of perpetual low-grade maintenance could be seen to be an active maintenance of that connection...
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at September 13, 2003 10:53 AM
Hmm. Is the use of IM buddy lists a true parallel, then, of the prairie dog's yip or bark across its territory to other prairie dogs? Is a form of shout-out a deminimus requirement for a weak tie? What is the digital parallel -- merely blogrolling, or actual interaction? Is the lack of a nominal shout-out mechanism the reason why some mammals can't sustain networks of 150+ nodes?
(I posted some thoughts on this subject after reading this post; perhaps it's not a augmentation of *external* social systems, but an augmentation of *internal* systems that we're seeking through networked mediation: http://blogs.salon.com/0001549/2003/09/10.html#a939 )
→ Posted by: Rayne at September 16, 2003 4:18 PM
I think that social networks software, esp. friendster, capitalizes on the large portion of the population who have high affiliation needs. some people need to have large numbers of friends. by providing a service to extend and keep in touch, websites such as friendster have really given the "affiliation-addict" what s/he needs.
→ Posted by: Rob at October 13, 2003 3:34 AM
I think the 'affiliation' model is a good way to look at it. it really won't change anybody's social life any more than email already did/has/does. and once you find the people/friends/date, you still may end up pushing them/being pushed off a cliff someday when they/you least expect it. so whatever. if people want to pay for/use friendster, i say let them.
→ Posted by: Cold Bacon at October 13, 2003 10:23 PM
Commenting on Rob's point: The question is whether Friendster is actually able to capitalize on people's "affiliation needs". KleinerPerkins, a larger VC firm that has recently invested a substantial amount into Friendster, obviously believes so. However, I am not quite sure about it, yet.
→ Posted by: Fritz Honymann at November 24, 2003 1:50 PM
Hi - interesting you've linked to my research I did back in 2001. Robin Dunbar was my tutor for my final year and the project was a result of something he was interested in. Apparently similar relationships between neocortex and group size exist in bats - although the researcher who was looking into this has vanished. Perhaps the most interesting offshoot of this argument is the theory of evolution of language - language as a 'grooming' tool used to maintain social bonds between large groups of primates. (A zoologist before me did a project which involved catergorising conversations overheard in pubs - the vast majority were about other people - hence social 'grooming;)
I was quite surprised how good the correlations were - the graphs all have nice upward slopes which would indicate a strong connection (particularly if you ignore some of the random values generated by the duikers in particual) - I did make a mistake in my calculations as they're based on neocortex size rather than ratio, but the university missed that one and i still got my 2.1 for it!
→ Posted by: Peter Taylor at September 21, 2005 5:24 PM