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Dunbar's Number

#1
Magical Realist Offline
Unfortunately for this theory, Facebook is changing the definition of "friend." Now it can include people you never see but just communicate online with. I have 48 friends on Facebook. My nephew, who is an actor in short films, has 1,492friends. I doubt he has stable relationships with all these people. And his head is normally sized. OTOH, "Dunbar explained it informally as "the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar". So maybe he does have that many friends.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

"Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.[1][2] This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size.[3] By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain only 150 stable relationships.[4] Dunbar explained it informally as "the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar".[5]



Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.[6][7] Dunbar's number states the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, nor people just generally known with a lack of persistent social relationship, a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size.

Dunbar 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 himself or herself if they met again..."
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#2
C C Offline
For some reason the significances and nuances of "friend" and "comrade" in religious cults and ideological communities keeps impinging on my feelings about it. The meaning and utilization of "family" in those contexts, too.

- - -
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#3
Yazata Offline
When I was at my most social back in college, when my housemates and I hosted and attended lots of parties, I figured that I had about 100 friends. People that I'd met, liked, who seemed to like me, whose names I generally knew and I wouldn't mind socializing with.

Of course in those days we met everyone face to face.

I rarely look at Facebook. I don't have a personal account and thus have no "friends". I kind of like having a minimal social media footprint (apart from here and a handful of other boards like this one, I guess).
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#4
Syne Offline
Yeah, before the explosion of cell phones, people would regularly just drop by my place or other known party/hangout pads we knew.

And I'm with you on being a social media Luddite.
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#5
stryder Offline
Back in the mid-90's when part of my socialisation was actually using the Internet prior to the dotBomb-dotBoom rebound. The people I knew in the real world would joke of this "Internet fad", with the suggestions that the people I spoke to online "weren't real". In fact those sorts of jokes were maintained with the concept that every person that claimed to be woman online was likely a man and that literally the internet was filled full of fake people in that sense.

This might have been true in some of the chatrooms, however the majority of the internet at that time point was students, professors, scientists, media etc. People were still sending Faxes, Telex had only just been obsoleted, people were still meeting with each other and using Pagers to keep in contact.

I guess if you were to look a the Technological Chasm, my involvement at that point was somewhere low down in the crux prior to the "awakening" thanks to commercial approval of the internet and their investment opportunities.

In some respects the "joke" recognition of the status of online people kept with me to some extent, along with some of the doctrines I picked up along the way (There was a big Anti-Corporation/Anti-Capitalism sentiment at the time in regards to who controlled the internet and media, where by it wasn't cool to allow Monopolization by just doing things on one website like Facebook)

While I have a facebook page, it's bland, unapparent and abscent. It's rarely used to keep in contact with those people I use to really know (The ones that use to joke about the hours spent online that can't go minutes without updating their status)
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