Just before Christmas I did an interview with the SF Chronicle for an article titled Year in Review: Social networks come of age by Benny Evangalista. Benny and I had a conversation about social networks and how far they have come. In the article he conjectures that social networks are here to stay, as is evident by their adoption inside big companies. Our discussion revived a topic I’ve been wanting to write about after several years of working in this space; social networks represent the next step in expanding the capacity of human relationships.
Telephone, Email, Social Networks and the Monkey Sphere
The Monkey Sphere (also known as Dunbar’s number ) is a theory from evolutionary biology which was derived from the study of groups of monkeys (or more specifically non-human primates) in Africa. Researchers studying monkey clans found that as a clan’s size grew towards a magical number of 150 monkeys, communication systems would break down, and the clan would break into two separate clans. These clans would then each again grow to 150 members, split into two groups, rinse and repeat. Researchers postulate that this barrier of 150 members could not be exceeded due to the communication strain on the clan as the number of nodes exceeded 150. Dunbar and others postulate this same theory applies to human relationships.
For most of human history our interactions were limited to a small social group, generally limited by physical geography. Much like our primate relatives, this led our ancestors to only maintain relationships with those that they could talk to in person on a regular basis.
Enter the telephone
The physical barrier was broken when the telephone emerged. We were no longer required physical proximity to another human to maintain a productive relationship (I’m ignoring physical letters because of their slow communication cycle time). With the introduction of the telephone our monkey sphere increased monotonically. But telephones had a limited effect because communication was limited to one on one discussions.
Nearly one century later the monkey sphere was stretched further by the internet, and specifically email. Not only could communication happen without the need for physical proximity, but it had less marginal overhead (no small talk), and it was our first of the democratized one to many communication mediums (newspapers, books, and magazines only provided one to many communication capabilities to a limited subset of the population). Oh, and to add to the argument, email is asynchronous – you don’t need to participate in the conversation at the same time as the other members. Our monkey sphere started expanding geometrically.
Back to my discussion with Benny. The topic at hand was social networks and how they represent the latest step in expanding our monkey sphere beyond natural levels. Social networks have no need for physical proximity, they have less marginal overhead than email, they are asynchronous, they are one to many, and increasingly they are public, not even requiring that you know the people you are communicating with (ex: Twitter and the increasingly public news feed on Facebook). Social networks have changed how, with who, and how often communication is created and consumed.
The telephone, email, and social networks all represent big steps in our communication evolution, and it has all happened in the last 100 years. Interestingly, it also appears to be accelerating. I believe that I currently have personal relationships (which I define as knowing their name, face, where they live, what they do, and having shared some experiences together) with nearly 1,000 people. What next step in communication technology will take me to 10,000 personal relationships? Is it possible? The communication of our location might give us the next big leap.
10,000 personal relationships might sound ridiculous. But so did a 2 GHz processor in 1988 when I was booting from a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk so I could play video games on my dad’s 10MHz Digital computer. Is it possible there is a Moore’s law for human relationships? I think it is more likely that a Moore’s law exists for human relationships than a Dunbar number.