Social networking hasn’t expanded our ‘monkeyspheres’
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A monkey eating ice cream. Credit: Anindito Mukherjee / European Pressphoto Agency
With all of our iPhones, Facebooks, Twitters and other wonders of modern technology, we’ve certainly come a long way from our primate ancestors. But our biology apparently hinders us from becoming the extreme social butterflies that social media theoretically enables.
Some have suggested that online social tools provide a way for people to expand their relationships further than ever before. While we can certainly reach a wider audience more easily, scientists believe the number of real friendships that any one person can maintain remains largely the same. Based on research of ape behavior, humans apparently can’t handle more than about 150 in their inner circles. The theoretical limit is called Dunbar’s number.
The Economist interviewed Cameron Marlow, Facebook’s in-house sociologist, to see how social interactions on the website compare with the Dunbar’s number hypothesis. Marlow says core friendships haven’t appeared to change much. Even folks with hundreds or even thousands of Facebook friends interact regularly with ...
... only a small group:
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.
So, no, Tila Tequila, with her 3.6 million MySpace friends, is no gregarious superhuman. And neither are all those ‘social media experts’ with tens of thousands of Twitter followers. They’re just good at advertising themselves.
If you’re still not totally clear on this whole ‘primordial social circle’ mumbo-jumbo, we can point you in the direction of a clever editorial that puts it in layman terms. The article called ‘What is the Monkeysphere?’ was penned years ago by humor columnist David Wong, and now resides on Cracked.com. It’s actually quite witty in its execution, but because of its profane nature, we can’t link to it.
If you’re interested and can deal with the potty-mouth, we hear Google might be able to point you in the right direction. But I’m sure you knew that already. You’re no dumb ape, right?
-- Mark Milian