What's in a Number?
In recent conversations, I've been returning to the idea that Facebook and social media generally are driving us insane. Social media, and Facebook in particular are certainly useful. I went to my 30-year high school reunion last year, and Facebook played a major role in shaping that gathering. The Friends of the C-Realm group on Facebook puts me in touch with listeners to the C-Realm Podcast, and probably more importantly, puts listeners in touch with one another. That notion, that C-Realm listeners can be "in touch" with one another via the medium of Facebook hints, in part at least, how social media makes us crazy.
We can't touch one another on Facebook, though we can have conversations. We are social primates adapted to band together for mutual protection and to help one another "make a living," which is to say, to meet our basic survival needs as well as our need for intimate contact with lovers, parents, children, friends, and rivals. Even when we are not physically touching one another, being in close proximity to the people we know and depend on has a strong physical component. Our empathic brain circuitry prompts us to project ourselves into the skin of the members of our tribe. Based on their posture, their facial expressions, their gate and even their smell, we can not only determine their mood and disposition, but we have a very good idea of what they're feeling. This is not an intellectual capacity. It is something we feel, and this sort of familiarity and proximity counts as being "in touch" in a way that being able to share text, images and hyperlinks does not.
Dunbar's number is the number of people that we, as social primates, can maintain stable relations with. I think of this as the number of people we can know as people. I have, at present, 2,097 "friends" on Facebook. Obviously, most of them are not friends in any meaningful sense. I don't know how many of them I've actually met face to face, how many are friends of friends or acquaintances of acquaintances, or how many are just people that know of my existence through the podcast.
There is a continuum between Facebook friends that I have a real sense of and those who are complete strangers to me. Some of those Facebook friends are people I've never met but who I have spoken to over Skype. Having a voice to go with a name and whatever I can learn from someone based on what they write and post makes them more real to me than people I've never heard speak. When I meet an online acquaintance, even people I've interacted with online for years, they take a quantum leap toward being "real" people in my experience. Being a podcaster, there are many people who know my voice, who have listened to it for years, and who feel a familiarity with me that I don't feel with them. I've found that when I meet such people face to face, even if I've had only minimal contact with them online, that their sense of familiarity is infectious, and very quickly I come to feel a much stronger connection to them than my very limited experience of them would suggest is possible.
Some people I've never spoken to or met in person still occupy a category of familiarity beyond he level of mere acquaintance. The distance and disembodiment of on-line relationships can prompt a level of sharing that would require more trust and familiarity to match in face to face coimmunication. This willingness to share and be vulnerable with people online seems to have withered away in recent years, but I don't know if online culture has changed or if if it's just me. Maybe I've grown older and developed less need for the sorts of interactions that lead to that kind of openness in online communication.
My Facebook friends occupy positions on a spectrum. At the near end of that spectrum are people I knew before there was such a thing as Facebook and other people who would be important to me if the internet disappeared tomorrow. At the far end are people I don't know from Adam. In between lie people who I don't know as people, but who are not complete strangers. This portion of the spectrum is a spectrum unto itself with people at the closer end seeming like real people compared to those at the far end, who are just an iota away from being complete non-entities. These are the poeple with whom I am most likely to get into dysfunctional exchanges. Mostl of what I know about these token people is how their opinion differs from mine. They become the embodiments of opinions that I see as flawed, which turns them into essentially flawed beings. Of course, the people I know in real life are flawed, but the kinship mechanisms instilled in us by our evolutionary history keeps me from seeing the real people around me primarily in terms of their flaws. Those mechanisms do not work in cyberspace. Not yet, away.
I hope and suspect that human culture will evolve to overcome some of the most dysfunctional aspects of how we relate to one another online. Transhumanists may envision upgrades to our neo-cortex that will allow us to know hundreds or thousands of people as intimately as our pre-historic ancestors knew the 150 people with whom they lived and faced the challenges of making a living. Perhaps AI intermediaries will help us interface with distant humans and cooperate and learn from one another without getting hung up on our differences, but I'm betting on cultural adaptation playing the crucial role.
Psychonauts and devotees of the late Terence McKenna will probably remind me that, "Culture is not your friend." This is true. Culture doesn't care about any of us as individuals, and some of the compromises it demands of us strip the joy and spontaneous self-expression from life, but culture does allow us to live in nation states comprised of hundreds of millions of individuals when our biology still wants to gravitate to groups of 150.