Welcome To My Monkeysphere: social grooming on the internet
Dunbar's number represents the largest number of social connections that an animal can maintain at one time. Some of those limits are cognitive and some are practical. If you live on an island with five people, the number of people in your monkeysphere can be no more than five.
One practical limit to dunbar's number is a social bonding ritual like social grooming. Two monkeys spend an hour picking the nits off each other creating both a nit-free monkey couple and a bond of trust, mutual respect, and social cooperation.
Dunbar's "Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language" suggests that language serves as an alternative to social grooming. Instead of spending an hour picking nits off of occulpanid's scalp I can achieve the same result with a ten minute conversation in our shared parking lot. Cutting the ritual time from one hour to ten minutes means I can make six times as many social connections - a big advantage.
I think not just that Dunbar is correct, but that there are lots of other advances that allow us to create and maintain larger social relationships than would otherwise be possible. For example LiveJournal allows me to broadcast my thoughts to all 334 people who currently read my blog, and the comment feature allows you to write back to me. This doesn't mean that all 334 of my readers are now the equivalent of tick-picking social peers, but a surprising number of them are. (Hi, guys!) Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook provide similar opportunities to connect with social peers. I managed to convince matrushkaka that I was a socially acceptable peer by interacting with her and her peers on Friendster and the LA Bikers List back in the day. When mrl24 writes about his day at home and ianvass responds with a similar story about his day at home they look to me like they're reinforcing their social structures with the modern, internet-based equivalent of social grooming. And, to be clear, I completely endorse this practice as a Good Thing.
I'd like to take this one step further, though. Facebook allows its users to develop facebook apps to interact in novel ways. I'd like to bring the "internet-based friend networks as social grooming" idea full circle writing a social grooming Facebook app that lets my friends pick virtual ectoparasites off each other. I've already created the app page, and filled it in with some icons and data but I'm a little stumped by how to write (and where to put) the code that keeps track of which parasites are available and who is picking them off whom. If any of you have experience writing facebook apps and would like to give me a hand I will be happy to return the favor by picking ticks off your back.
One practical limit to dunbar's number is a social bonding ritual like social grooming. Two monkeys spend an hour picking the nits off each other creating both a nit-free monkey couple and a bond of trust, mutual respect, and social cooperation.
Dunbar's "Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language" suggests that language serves as an alternative to social grooming. Instead of spending an hour picking nits off of occulpanid's scalp I can achieve the same result with a ten minute conversation in our shared parking lot. Cutting the ritual time from one hour to ten minutes means I can make six times as many social connections - a big advantage.
I think not just that Dunbar is correct, but that there are lots of other advances that allow us to create and maintain larger social relationships than would otherwise be possible. For example LiveJournal allows me to broadcast my thoughts to all 334 people who currently read my blog, and the comment feature allows you to write back to me. This doesn't mean that all 334 of my readers are now the equivalent of tick-picking social peers, but a surprising number of them are. (Hi, guys!) Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook provide similar opportunities to connect with social peers. I managed to convince matrushkaka that I was a socially acceptable peer by interacting with her and her peers on Friendster and the LA Bikers List back in the day. When mrl24 writes about his day at home and ianvass responds with a similar story about his day at home they look to me like they're reinforcing their social structures with the modern, internet-based equivalent of social grooming. And, to be clear, I completely endorse this practice as a Good Thing.
I'd like to take this one step further, though. Facebook allows its users to develop facebook apps to interact in novel ways. I'd like to bring the "internet-based friend networks as social grooming" idea full circle writing a social grooming Facebook app that lets my friends pick virtual ectoparasites off each other. I've already created the app page, and filled it in with some icons and data but I'm a little stumped by how to write (and where to put) the code that keeps track of which parasites are available and who is picking them off whom. If any of you have experience writing facebook apps and would like to give me a hand I will be happy to return the favor by picking ticks off your back.