“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.
Dunbar’s number was first proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who theorized that “this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.” On the periphery, the number also includes past colleagues such as high school friends with whom a person would want to reacquaint themselves if they met again.” Wikipedia
Speculation upon speculation has led to measurement of the number of workable and sustainable connections for social networks like Facebook, something totally out of logic simply because Facebook makes it possible to “touch” each others friends and followers far beyond Dunbar’s theoretical limit. Facebook enables virtual relationships and the social relations are real, tangible and without any intermediation.
My personal account on twitter, the number of people and companies I follow, is seven times that of Dunbars Law. Yet I am able to maintain these relationships using groups settings, siloing activities, interests and prioritizing communications.
The hierarchies and limits do not exist outside of our corporeal entities, they are fantasies that tell us how close we are to each other in terms of similarity as a measure of narcissisim. This categorization of social relations are established primarily as a measure of the affinity I have with other network members. But remember that there is another dimension, the real, which measures the geographical separation.
Tweetups and meetups, $5k charity road races add another hierarchy completely different from the first of its origin and is a natural gradient of the spatial distribution of the availability of resources to meet our physiological needs in the social space. Simply said “IRL”, In Real Life is evolving location based social networking beyond simple mapping of events and places. Where online transcends geographical connectivity presenting presence based social networking.
Social networks of direct interaction recurrently makes us put our feet on the ground, because the affinity is an ideal. If we consider a limit to the social network of direct interaction, say the number of Dunbar, that limit will establish a border between the material of human relations from a local and a global dimension.
While this transition is discrete, abrupt changes are from 1 to 150, since the other dimensions are incorporated, the network is definitely moving away from reality and becomes purely virtual greatly extending theoretical Dunbar limits.
The Value of Being a Connector
Gladwell speaks of Dunbars Number in the Tipping Point. The greater numerical value attributed to a person the higher propensity towards creating a groundswell around their communications within their circle of dominant influence, multiplied by their followers sphere of influence.