Dunbar’s Number vs. Ning: How big is your brain?

Sure you can fit 1,000,000 people into your Ning network, but don’t expect them to fit in your head, even if you do look like that little kid on Family Guy. Your cognitive reality, is that all these “relationships” just don’t fit into your brain. So the question becomes: in order to make way for an exponential number of relationships, do we:
1. Create a definition of “friend” or “acquaintance” that vastly reduces the amount of cognitive resource required to maintain the definition of friend across absurd numbers of people?
2. Do we accept that each peep-node in our network is not actually significant?
3. Do we rank our peep-nodes to enable an allocation of brain-sustenance based on personal importance?

Or possibly none of the above. I maintain that people are not nearly as good at being social as pop-social media would like us to believe. I further maintain(and I’ve said this plenty of times) that the dynamic personal value of an increasingly large relationship-network actually trends downward, rather than upward the diluting effect of Dunbar’s Number begins to erode the quality of individual peep-nodes. That is unless we can hold constant the Dunbar Cognitive Plateau, while at the same increasing the number of peep-nodes that we connect to. So how is this possible? As follows:

Peep-Node = Sum(a,b,c,d………n)
Dunbars Number = 150
Cognitive Plateau = 150(Peep Node)

If a Peep-Node in our relationship network is comprised of N number of variables, lets say 10(name, birthday, sex, favorite color, etc), then our Cognitive Plateau equals 150 multiplied by N., or in this case: 150 x 10 = 1500.

We can therefore say that we socially saturated when we are required to maintain fluency in 1500 pieces of data regarding our social network.

But let say that we were willing to forego all 10 pieces of information about each peep-node. And that we were more interested in simply remembering each person’s first name. it would follow that we could then increase our number of viable peep-nodes from 150 to 1500, but of course nothing comes for free. We have not made our brains bigger, we have simply filtered our cognitive database. And for sure, there are lots of good reasons to know lots of names, at the sacrifice of knowing lots of names + favorite color.

Take for example the Office Manager with 150 employees. Is he perceived as a better or worse manager if he knows all 150 first names? Or if he knows 50 first names + dog’s name + shoe size? It’s a bit of a downer for the 100 people who did not make the Top 50 list.

Taken to another level, and moving beyond the personal/social aspects of a human network, what if we were more interested in maintaining stable relationships with only people who’s favorite candy bar is Snickers? This is more to the point of Ning, but it is a trap!! Great! We have the Snicker-Lover network. Chat with global Snicker-files everywhere. Chat about what? You’re bumping up against the Dunbar Plateau constantly. There are 1500 Snicker-groupies in the network, and you can’t possible know anything about them except how they get their sugar fix……But wait, since they are in the network, can’t I just stop thinking about Snickers, and use that brain-space for something else? Cool. They wouldn’t be here unless they liked Snickers right? Now I can learn their names. See, this really is a stable network of relationships. I learned the names of “snicker2000”, “snixnosher”, and “DJ ReSnix”. I knew this network was powerful……

The bottom line is this: there is no evidence that suggests that we can derive personal relationship value from a multitude of bloated social networks. And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that much smaller personal relationship networks are the only ones that are viable. So is the answer for all of us to simple reduce the size of our networks? Of course not. We simply need tools. Tools that can help us glue these oversized networks together by socializing on our behalf, and reminding us of all the things that we have forgotten, or never had the time to learn in the first place. So hey, wouldn’t it be great if an analytical tool came along that could autonomously discover, and then notify us of all the cool things that we had in common with lots of other people? That’s the ticket: Relationship Outsourcing. We outsource our math. Why should be remember long division any more than we should remember what kind of candy bar Brad Pitt likes. There’s an App for that!

Next Up: Brian’s Number – the maximum number of digital tools that an individual can maintain fluency in concurrently. (but don’t worry, we will find a way to aggregate tools before there is some sort of social-real relationship Armageddon)