The monkeysphere has sooo many implications. Read David Wong’s Inside the Monkeysphere for the full account. Very concise and very approachable - and hilarious!
The essence of the monkeysphere is that we are biologically wired to maintain a functional social sphere of about 150 people - neighbours, family, coworkers, friends, etc. Beyond your monkeysphere, people become acquaintances and than strangers.
I’ve argued before that the people with 2000 Facebook friends don’t really have ‘friends’ but a large collection of superficial acquaintances; I wonder about the levels of interaction with all of those people. Anecdotally, a co-worker of mine said that when he went from 50 friends to 75 friends on Facebook, he stopped reading the newsfeed - it was too much to keep up with.
I’ve also talked about comment trolls - the people who show up for one day and leave nasty comments on your blog (blog rage). The question always comes up - why? Why do people feel that they can say hurtful things? I say it’s because you are outside their monkeysphere; you are just another piece of meat to them - they wouldn’t say thing like that to people in their monkeysphere. Think about this the next time you’re driving. Would you scream at other drivers the way you do if you actually knew them? Especially if they were in your monkeysphere? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
Problems in the world? Too many people for our monkeysphere:
The primary difference is that monkeys are happy to stay in small groups and rarely interact with others outside their monkey gang. This is why they rarely go to war, though when they do it is widely thought to be hilarious. Humans, however, require cars and oil and quality manufactured goods by the fine folks at 3M and Japanese video games and worldwide internets and, most importantly, governments. All of these things take groups larger than 150 people to maintain effectively. Thus, we routinely find ourselves functioning in bunches larger than our primate brains are able to cope with.
This is where the problems begin. Like a fragile naked human pyramid, we are simultaneously supporting and resenting each other. We bitch out loud about our soul-sucking job as an anonymous face on an assembly line, while at the exact same time riding in a car that only an assembly line could have produced. It’s a constant contradiction that has left us pissed off and joining informal wrestling clubs in basements.
I’m pretty excited about the monkeysphere - it’s one of those rare moments of pure cognitive crystallization.
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December 11th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Wong is, of course, working with the idea of Dunbar’s Number. And, yes, the monkeysphere post is a very clever application of Dunbar’s hypothesis. I can see its attraction to your general interest in how social networks, particularly online, work.
It makes me think that online communities like Facebook allow people to ‘associate’ in ways that are just about impossible outside of virtual worlds. I mean, how would someone even get 2000 acquaintances otherwise?
To what extent do you think the apparent violations on the net of Dunbar’s upper limit of 150 people are really a symptom or function of the possibilities of the internet?
Depending on your answer, it would also be interesting to consider whether or not Dunbar’s Number should be increased for internet-based circumstances. There is an argument, I suspect, that says you might actually be able to have more than 150 significant contacts online because the internet actually provides the infrastructure for such things to happen. Would the number be 2000? Doubt it. But, I’d like to see the argument that says Dunbar’s Number is too low for online communities.
Maybe there’s an opportunity for you to set Walker’s Number!
December 11th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
I think there are a lot of people outside of Facebook with thousands of acquaintances - sales people are one group who are interacting with hundreds or thousands of people. But are these people part of your community of people you could call up on the weekend to go to a movie, to help you move a couch, etc.?
I think Wong makes the point when he writes
“Those who exist outside that core group of a few dozen people are not people to us. They’re sort of one-dimensional bit characters. Remember the first time, as a kid, you met one of your school teachers outside the classroom? Maybe you saw old Miss Puckerson at Taco Bell eating refried beans through a straw, or saw your principal walking out of a dildo shop. Do you remember that surreal feeling you had when you saw these people actually had lives outside the classroom? I mean, they’re not people. They’re teachers.”
(that d*ld* comment’s going to get me in trouble on the search engines…)
If we look at online communities outside of Facebook - blogs, Digg, Flickr, etc. - the quality of relationships is almost non-existant. I don’t think any of my “friends” on COLOURlovers.com or Digg could possibly be considered even acquaintances. Of course, I could choose to engage them more, find the ones in Calgary and go have a coffee with them, but I have no desire to do so because I already have a group of 150 with whom I interact. I only know of one blog where the users meet up in person (Comics Curmudgeon).
Having said that, there are a number of bloggers I would like to meet with in person. I doubt they would end up in my inner social circle of 150, but they would be interesting people nonetheless.
Dunbar’s number is a bit simplistic when you consider the number of people in your professional circle, personal circle, family circle and so on. There is a considerable amount of overlap, and the quality of friendship varies. Maybe this is a reason we have complicated social rules - to help manage all of these different relationships.
How do you define you “inner social circle” and how many people are there? Or, to be more hard-nosed about it, how many people do you know where you would a) go to their funeral and b) cry at the funeral?
December 11th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
Your sales person example makes good sense, Dave. My problem is that I live Dunbar’s Number and just can’t conceive of even trying to keep track of more than a few people!
I suppose what we really need is a model (an algorithm?) for defining levels of friendship or ‘acquaintanceness.’ It might be a model where your inner circle is a dark colour and, then, as you move to outer social circle, to acquaintances, etc., you’d get a series of concentric rings with increasingly lighter colours. On the outside you’d get a clear ring with no colours in it at all representing strangers, or everyone else. (Do you put associates from specific social venues — sales clients, a teacher’s students — into a separate ring?)
To ask it in Wong’s terms, where is the threshold at which your one-dimensional contacts become multi-dimensional people? I wonder, too, if that threshold would be well be below Dunbar’s number. (Wong says this, in fact, when he suggests we might have as few as a few dozen people who are multi-dimensional.) So, you’ve taken me from thinking you might be able to raise Dunbar’s Number in internet-based situations to wanting to reduce it!
Let me change the question, then. Why do we continue to add contacts to our facbook pages beyond any kind of a manageable social sphere? For the sales person, there is a clear reason for adding contacts. For that matter, then, in what situations in the non-virtual world do we continue endlessly to add contacts to our social networks?
December 11th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
Yeah - I think my inner social circle is much less than 150.
I have one contact on Facebook with over 3100 friends. Ironically, from his blog:
Average Number of Friends Members are Connected To: 164
Median Number of Friends: 132
Sean seems to be a serial friender. There are a couple of reasons for this, I suspect. First, he is a word-of-mouth marketer, and a high volume of people to contact is important in his profession. Again, the “real” friends he has is, I suspect, much, much lower.
Second, some people are collectors, both on Facebook and in real life. There are people who count their self worth by the number of business cards in their Rolodex. The collection is important, not interacting with people in the collection.
Of your (maybe not you in particular, but an average user) Facebook friends, how many do you interact with regularly? A dozen? How many profiles do you check often? Never?
I think an acquaintanceness model would be fascinating - I’ll bet there’s a PhD thesis in there somewhere. I don’t think there it would be concentric circles, though. Overlapping circles more likely.
Regarding the one dimensional to multidimensional friendships, I quote Wong again:
“Think of Osama Bin Laden. Did you just picture a camouflaged man hiding in a cave, drawing up suicide missions? Or are you thinking of a man who gets hungry and has a favorite food and who had a childhood crush on a girl and who has athlete’s foot and chronic headaches and wakes up in the morning with a boner and loves volleyball? Something in you, just now, probably was offended by that. You think there’s an effort to build sympathy for the murderous fuck. Isn’t it strange how simply knowing random human facts about him immediately tugs at your sympathy strings? He comes closer to your Monkeysphere, he takes on dimension.”
The more you learn about someone, the closer they come to friendship and that inner circle. Isn’t that what friendship is, really? I think a lot of people go to lengths *not* to get to know someone so that they don’t become human (hostage situations come to mind).
I’m all for lowering Dunbar’s number for online social relationships quite drastically.
December 12th, 2007 at 11:42 am
We need to think through the idea of one-dimensional and multi-dimensional people a little more. The Osama example doesn’t do it for me. I’ll never attribute the same status to him as I do other people even if I know something warm and fuzzy about him. It is also true that I will never be friends with Brittany Spears or Stephen Harper. I can learn a tremendous amount about those people. They take on added dimension, to be sure. But, surely the distinctions we are talking about between strangers, acquaintances, friends, and inner circle friends involves more than simply knowing something about them. At a minimum, they have to know something about you too.
(Where do your enemies fit into this? You know your enemy, he or she knows you. Do they warrant the same status as your inner circle?)
As for the concentric versus overlapping circles models: yes, a sophisticated model of facebook and other online community groups would almost certainly require overlapping circles. I was simply trying to sketch out a basic way of identifying the sliding scale of friendship we are talking about here. Try this: make the rings proportional to the number of inner circle, friends, acquaintances, strangers in your facebook account. Put yourself in the middle. Where are the fattest rings?
December 13th, 2007 at 11:04 am
I don’t think the example is off the mark - what it does is bring Osama just a little closer to your monkeysphere. It takes him from being a newspaper charicature to a reminder that he is also a human with human needs, desires, faults, etc.
Stereotyping works the same way. The act of stereotyping removes the human traits from a group of people, moving them farther away from your monkeysphere. If you ask a guy on the street about Native Canadians, you’d probably get the answer “alcoholics, lazy, lives off the government” etc., etc. But ask them if the know a Native Canadian, they’ll probably say yes, but he isn’t like the others.
If you look at Nazi propaganda of the 30’s (an extreme example, I know), they tried very hard (and were successful) in isolating the Jews from the Germans - removing them from the everyday German’s monkeysphere. The most successful propagandists and marketers know how to manipulate an individual’s monkeysphere.
Think: the next time you are mad at (insert corporation here) and you call customer service, do you yell are the CSR who is a proxy for the company? Do you step back, realize they are human and deal with them on a human level? By doing that, do you bring the CSR closer to your monkeysphere?
The enemy idea is fascinating - maybe a subset of one or several levels?
I like your proposal - I’ll give it a shot in my copious spare time.