The network theories, the actual size of your social network & the circle of intimacy

Image Courtesy : Sugree / Flickr

Social Networking has become a loose term to define any kind of online connections and not the social relationships. Social Network term was in existance much before the advent of first online social network and we all need to blame Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon to trigger the wave of online social networks. This interesting experiment was may be an inspiration behind many online social networks. If you remember the first implementation of online social network “ Friend of a Friend” was a big thing and it was all about computing the shortest path to particular person whom you wanted to add on to your network.

This true nature of social networking, path display and shortest path computation still exists in LinkedIn. Many others, found out later that this is the most CPU & DB intensive task and also that people are not just here to connect but also to do many more things. But it was a novelty then and the social networking fever was picking up.

But as we network and think that we are growing our groups and getting into never ending friending. That’s where we hit the wall and realize that one Mr. Robin Dunbar is trying to stop us by tying around us with the magical number 150. From his studies he concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. And for humans it was 148, rounded off to 150.

There was also this study by Peter Marsden of Harvard University that found that Americans still maintain a very few handful of individuals with whom they can discuss the important matters.  And this trend was exhibiting a dip even when Americans are great at socialising. This was similar to "dunbar circle" and we was termed as "social core". You can download the paper as “Core Discussion Networks of Americans (pdf)”

The Economist through their in-house sociologist Cameron Marlow found that we are still the same primates on facebook, twitters or any other SNS, bounded by the same networking limit. From the article:

Dr Marlow found that the average number of “friends” in a Facebook network is 120, consistent with Dr Dunbar’s hypothesis, and that women tend to have somewhat more than men. But the range is large, and some people have networks numbering more than 500, so the hypothesis cannot yet be regarded as proven.

What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more “active” or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group.

Thus an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.

This basically means that you are not networking or adding friends on social networks.

• You are still within the “Dunbar Circle” in terms of your actual friends on the social networks
• You are still within the “social core” in terms of actual conversation and social transactions.

So what actually you are doing is that you are broadcasting your life to a outer tier of the acquaintances.

As the article sums it up well:

Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.

Once you have given a read to The Economist article “Primates on Facebook” you must also go through Cameron Marlow’s blog overstated and read “Maintained Relationships on Facebook” where he explains the approach, the data and the analysis and also to answers some questions raised through Monkeysphere (which is also a nice read / twist)

Happy Friending !!!

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