"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.[1] 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, via wikipedia
I've been reading some interesting things lately (here and here) about Dunbar's number as it applies to social networking sites. Essentially, the number breaks down like this for social networking profiles (via Read Write Web):
"According to Cameron Marlow, Facebook's "in-house sociologist," that number is four if you are male and six if you are female. As the Economist reports this morning, Marlow's research indicates that the average Facebook user has a network of about 120 friends, but only has two-way conversations with a very small subset of these 'friends.' Interestingly, even for those users who have a far larger number of friends (500+), those numbers barely grow (ten for men and sixteen for women)."
While Marlow's assessment relates directly to FB, which is quite unlike Twitter, the general conclusion is interesting. Namely, that there are only so many people we can reasonably and thoughtfully engage given the fixed capacity of the human OS and available relationship RAM.
Mindless following: social capital
This leads me to ask, as others have, why we are following so very many people in services like Twitter when the reality of our attention is so limited. Author and social reseacher Mary Hodder cites the following example (in a comment from my post about protected updates):
"The other day I had a woman lash out at me on twitter for not following back everyone who follows me. She followed 6k people and I pointed out that there was no way she could read all those people all the time. I actually wanted a list of people I could reasonably follow. In other words we all have our own way of doing it, and while people may be judgmental, I was not judgmental of her for giving those she follows a false sense that she actually reads all their stuff."
As Mary points out, its one thing to follow 6K people, but quite another to engage that many people on any level beyond a fleeting @, which may only function as a token of social capital for those seeking micro-status or connection with high profile figures online (as so many of these SEO-social media marketers suggest newcomers to do ...). Mary, like me, wants to use this tool to engage signal, rather than gaming it for social capital. A couple of other things struck me about the import of Mary's comment. First, the fact that anyone would admonish her for "not following back" and second, that this person would deign to tell a social theorist her job. While I don't object to challenging authorities on their ideas, I do object to empowered ignorance (i.e., critiqueing somebody's ideas without having any meaningful knowledge of the origins or contexts of that person's prior knowledge or work). Which leads me to my final point. Connecting with a person without prior social knowledge, history, context or capital is only part of the problem with the impulsivity of following on social networks.Many people, for example, quickly add anyone with a high profile for no other reason than that that person has a high profile -- without engaging - on even the most superficial level - that expert's body of ideas or context. I see thousands of people follow, for example, danah boyd - many of whom have likely not so much as read a single post in danah's blog or research papers. Ironically, danah rarely posts much at all on Twitter, which seems a bit of the punchline to the joke of following authorities without reason (i.e., if she's not posting about her work, why are you following?). Which is why I follow danah as a symbolic gesture of my respect for her work, which I've been reading and engaging since 2003.
The mindless following seems to be based on one thing and one thing only: A game of social capital, not genuine connection or "relating."My (Twitter) identity: Yours to discover (or invent) That we cannot expect every new connection to take a moment and click on our website or read our about page is what I'm getting at. That some people are willing to connect without making so much as a momentary investment in context is a really questionable expression of "connection." If you're communicating with a person on a daily without doing so much as a rudimentary exploration of their identity (even a visit to their site) you are properly connecting with an *idea* not a person. A fictional character built on your own subjective guesswork, misreadings and convenient assumption. Our resulting relationship, in that context, is highly propblematic. Particularly when people start describing this relationship as "knowing" someone. We can certainly "get to know" someone but doing so requires actual effort on the part of both parties. Which leads me to my final thoughts. Mindful following: social signalWhile I myself continue to make connection with new people and add new people to my network based largely on the promise of a meaningful connection or shared interests, I also see the opportunities to mindfully engage these people decreasing with every new follow I add. While I certainly increase the "variety" of the tweets I'm viewing, I'm also creating more and more distance between myself and the handful of people whose tweets I might follow as more of a cohesive or narrative self expression. Instead, I get only a fleeting blip on the social radar of every person I have come into contact with on the service. As these blips increase so, too, does the noise. Imagine yourself at a giant coctail party catching only snippets of conversations - totally decontextualised from the speakers and their larger narratives. Misreadings, among other things, would arise with greater frequency due to the lack of context for what is being shared (and with whom). I'm still wrestling with the issue of how many people I can meaningfully follow. For now, I'm discovering that of the close to 300 people I follow, only a handful post with any regularity. So the Dunbar number is also influenced - highly - by participation metrics. I can safely say that I'm not going to reach that number any time soon based on the volume of my follows who actively participate. But I will likely make a decision at the point at which I can no longer keep up and likely write about that when it occurs. This is my speculative conclusion at this moment. I don't see it as a permanent position I desire to prove or reinforce but a considered perspective that may change in time. And I'm fully ready and interested in developing these thoughts with the help and insight of others - also engaged in similar questions. Your take?No doubt, you have a lot of opinions about all of the above - including your own insights and questions. Please take a moment and share them below. I'm interested in knowin the following: 1) What do you think about Mary's comment about following 6K people and what this says about your approach to engagement? 2) How many people do you currently follow and how would you characterise your Dunbar number? 3) How much of an effort are you willing to make when choosing to follow somebody? Do you visit their links? Read through their recent tweets, explore their friends lists? Are trust metrics a meaningful part of that choice?
I didn't write this post for myself. I wrote it on behalf of every single person in Twitter who chooses to take advantage of a built in feature that designers thought was important enough to include. I'm no n00b I've been online a long time. I have lived and worked online since the late 90's when I got an internet connection through my university.I love to explore and try things. I will try just about every new web service or tool that sounds different than the ones before. I'm a long time blogger and have explored many social networks within weeks of their arrival. But as open as I am to exploring, I'm also a critically minded adopter who doesn't mindlessly accept increasingly bad terms of service or "opt out" paradigms of use. Once upon a time, a very long time ago (before social media), human social groups had different ways of establishing community, trust and power bases. We had personal settings that we adjusted according to the nature (or newness) of a particular relationship. We called them boundaries. Some of us thought it might be a good idea to have these kinds of settings in our online social spaces. We called these people user-centered designers. Being "protected" in TwitterI got my first invitation to Twitter very shortly after it launched. For me, it was too early and I couldn't yet see the purpose. When I finally started participating, a large enough user base made it more worthwhile. And most of the people I wanted to talk to were there too. I wasn't particularly afraid of "sharing" in Twitter. It was less a matter of "what" I was sharing than "where" and "with whom." What was new and different was having conversations in plain view of anyone else and having my relationships and networks exposed. That's where this tool goes into territory that is much more personally meaningful because my networks include people who matter to me beyond the random strangers who join my network later on.
As far as I can remember, danah boyd is of the few online voices to point out that sharing the nature of our relationships and networks carries different consequences according to power, privilege and existing social capital. For a political activist, the disclosure of allies and trusted friends is counterproductive to activism. Likewise, for an elementary or secondary school teacher, who understand that their identities are highly mediated by professional bodies and stakeholders - boards, administrators, principals, parents and students - the need for boundaries is more than a personal choice but a professional necessity.
My questions about the context of public conversations in Twitter has nothing to do with technology, prudery, hiding or "not getting it" this has to do with a global information paradigm that many of us - in our breathless haste to join in and "be a part of" things haven't really properly examined.
Even Facebook, a service that was notoriously hostile to the stated requests of users, has changed its privacy settings to allow us to decide who, specifically, has access to what. I believe the reason they changed things was because a lot of users like me made a lot of noise - and we didn't stop making noise - until they gave us the settings we demanded. Unfortunately Twitter is a much simpler tool that reveals your entire network, status updates and conversations to anyone and everyone who has access to your feed - including, thanks to RSS, the entire internet. You have only two choices: total exposure or partial exposure. It is not "granular" as information designers would say. "Isn't protected updates missing the point?"This is the most common objection I've heard from people who don't understand protected updates. This response is problematic on two levels. First, there is the notion that Twitter has an undisputable, agree-upon and specific "point." Yet, all we really know about Twitter is what each of us chooses to do with it according to the settings provided. Developers built in certain features with different needs in mind. If the service offers us an option, that's their way of saying it's up to us how it is we wish to use that tool. I don't like rules lawyers. I don't like other people telling me how I should properly use a tool - particularly when that tool is emergent. The thing about best practices? Everybody's got one. A best practice is contextual to a particular type of user and purpose. The second problem I have with (the notion that somebody else knows better than I do how I should use a tool) is how this oft stated reasoning constitutes a profound ignorance of privacy politics online. As Cory Doctorow and others have repeatedly pointed out: privacy is not the same as secrecy. And privacy is a right we're quickly giving away. You hear people say "what have you got to hide?" It's not about hiding or secrecy it's about basic and fundamental democratic rights. Not wanting your phone tapped isn't about wanting to hide things, it's about the right to life without surveillance. Similarly with social networking privacy online, I'm not "concealing" my conversations in Twitter. I'm simply making a choice about who has access to my friends and conversations. Every time you go to meet a friend for a coffee at a cafe, other people may be in earshot and you accept this as part of being in a public space. Setting up a shotgun mic, detailing each of our identities and listing all our friends, and then sending this broadcast out to the internet is a different story. Better yet, how about putting a mic on your lapel and wearing that all day long - when you go to the doctor's office, when you're with your friends, when you're with your coworkers and when you go to the bathroom. RSS feeding my life to the internet: no thank youMany people don't realise this but a public account means you are automatically generating live feed of your life for the entire internet. I think a lot of people haven't really thought this one through. Seriously. It's one thing for me to broadcast an RSS of my blog. It's quite another for me to distribute endless copies of my conversations to places unknown. To generate data that can be repurposed into any online aggregator. Many Twitter-fed sites have popped up everywhere delivering a ready copy of all of your latest tweets. In one case, I read of a woman whose public feed was aggregated into a fake (sleazy) dating profile in another country. Her conversations, @'s and commentaries were delivered into this profile. Imagine if she made the mistake of tweeting the location of an event she was attending or any other bit of personal information we often let slip while amusing ourselves in Twitter - among our "friends."
The bottom line
I shouldn't have to explain why I want to protect my updates. Nobody should. Nor should the desire for personally meaningful social settings need be explained. Sadly, a great many people - in their rush to join up, join in and take part - are not spending nearly enough time thinking very deeply about the larger social, personal and professional implications of these activities. All of us are new to these very new tools. Let people be cautious, questioning and careful (as well as enthusiastic and exploring). These are good human instincts - our inclinations for survival got us pretty far as a species :)
Required viewing:
Cory Doctorow: Is it time for a privacy revolution? (video)
"Deciding when and under what circumstances your personal information is divulged tracks very closely to how free and how much power you have in a society" - Cory Doctorow
About a year ago I posted some photos of first editions I own on flickr.
Just today, I received this email:
"I have a hardback copy of the sixth edition of the 1955 publishing of Lolita by Olympia Press/Putnam but it's missing the jacket, is there anyway you could photograph the front and back covers so I can see what they look like and post/email to me? I'm working on a design assignment; my email is (removed out of respect for the sender)."
The line that really got me was:
"is there any way ..."
The wording is curious. I'm sure I can think of a way to scan or photograph my book then format and send to this person. I think the real question here is why, not how, I would undertake this.
As I read the above, I'm searching for some sort of awareness at the favour being asked, some acknowledgement of the imposition on my time - given that I am a stranger. I'm also wondering where the line is about how "eternally grateful" he/she would be if I did so.
This is not the first time I've received an email from a student in some far away place asking for my help on an assignment. I used to get messages like this on my old blog posts. I used to think it was cute. The format is usually the same: "hi stranger, read your stuff. Can you help me now with my homework." No awareness of imposition or etc.
I'm wondering who is responsible for teaching social graces and effective citizenship?
Parents? Teachers? Us?
Who is responsible to teach young people about participating in society - giving as well as taking, the social contract, reciprocity and etc? We could talk about entitlement and that sort of thing, but I think the larger issue is not whose to blame (clearly us), but what we can do to help them understand, relate to and empathize with others - beyond their own immediate needs.
So I'm leaving it to you, dear reader, to come up with the best response. One that indicates what's wrong with his/her approach in a lighthearted manner. I think there's a learning opportunity here, don't you?
Last week, while Tweet-sourcing metaphors to describe Twitter, Christopher Sessums sent me a link to the "Invisible College." I was immediately struck by the beauty of this idea as a metaphor for the emergent vision of education we're constructing together through our blogs, tweets, wikis and other experiments that exceed the institutional. The last line of this description, captures it completely "through experimental investigation":
I chose the image of the invisible college to represent what it is I am taking part in right now and how meaningful this idea is to me as an organizing metaphor.
I'm going to be using posterous to post thoughts and commentaries to Twitter that take up more than 140 characters, thus the title of my posterous: beyond140 :)
