June 1, 2010--Dunbar's Number

I have a friend who is addicted to LinkedIn.

For the uninitiated (which includes me), LinkedIn is an Internet-based social network that connects people for a variety of purposes. From their website they say they exisit primarily to enable members to locate people from their past--the social part of social network--but for most of the many millions who are active on LinkedIn, it is a way "to power" their careers, to "discover inside connections when you’re looking for a job or new business opportunity."

Just what they mean by inside connections is not entirely clear. But from my addicted friend there may be some insights to be gleaned about this.

He appears to be so actively involved with LinkedIn for at least two reasons: First, since he is between jobs by letting his LinkedIn connections know this he is hoping that someone he is linked to will help him find a job. Then, perhaps again as a result of being unemployed, with work having been so much a part of his identity, which is far from unusual, he is feeling lonely and bereft. The more people, then, he can induce to be linked to him the more it boosts his self-esteem, the more he feels engaged with the world, the more he feels cared about, paid attention to. Among other things he may be able to achieve what serves as affection and even friendship in 2010.

Thus, he spends a lot of time each day attempting to build his list. He thus far has more than 600 people thus far who show up on his LinkedIn page as in one way or another connected to him. He tells me that his personal goal is to hit 1,000. This would represent a measure of success for someone who, before not having a job and before discovering LinkedIn, used to measure it very differently.

Though LinkedIn for most is about resume- and career-building, describing itself unabashedly as about fostering "connections," other social networks say something different about themselves--Twitter has "followers," and Facebook, the grandaddy of them all, is about "friending." They famously turned the noun friend into a verb.

Quoted in the linked article from New York Times, clinical psychologist and executive coach Roger Fransecky says that friending "sustains an illusion of closeness in a complex world of continuous partial connections."

Partial connections I might add no more exemplified by the kinds of messages that typically get exchanged while friending.

To illustrate, here is a posting straight from someone's FB page:

Just got back from Crunch. Increased my reps by five. Making progress. Headed for Walgreens. The one on Broadway. Need toothpaste. Synsodyne works best for me. Ate something that upset my stomach. Have the burps all morning. Maybe the pasta from last night. Too much garlic. But feeling good. Sun's out. But they say rain later. Ugh.

Dr. Fransecky, by the way, has 2,984 FB friends. I of course curmudgeonally do not have a Facebook page. Not only am I technologically phobic but I do not think in my long lifetime that I exchanged even one word with that many people much less could get half that number to allow me to call them acquaintances much less versions of friends.

Networking-crazy Roger Fransecky, though, may soon be facing a uniquely Facebook problem. If he adds 2,016 new friends, which would bring him to 5,000, and then attempts to include just one more, on his FB page he will receive a version of this message--"Facebook will not allow you to add any more friends."

Five thousand is the limit. Not because FB does not have the computing capacity to allow members to run up even bigger numbers. They do. But still, 5,000 it is.

Facebook won't say exactly why it has capped members at this level; but perhaps out of concern for their mental health some consultant psychologist (not Roger Fransecky of course) told them that, like my LinkedIn friend, if the sky is the limit people obsessed with amassing a Guinness record number of friends will do things to endanger their health--like not sleeping or eating--and then their heirs will wind up suing Facebook just as cigarette smokers successfully sued Philip Morris.

So if you reach 5,000 and get that message, what to do? To add a new person, someone you recently met and might turn out to be an actual friend, you will have to "unfriend" someone on your FB list. According to Steenath Sreenivasan, dean of students at Columbia University's School of Journalism, you have to commit "Facebook murder." The good dean himself may face that as soon as today since he already has 5,000 FB friends. Keep an eye on the New York Post's Page Six to see if he winds up committing virtual homicide.

Old-fashioned and out-of-touch as I clearly am, about these friends and connections matters, I like what Oxford professor Robin Dunbar has to say.

Back in the 1990s he studied the social networking of non-human primates and found that because of their brain size (actually, their neocortexes) the maximum number of stable interpersonal relationships they have the capacity to maintain is 148. He confirmed this subsequently with human studies (we are after all related) and found the same thing. Thus we have Dunbar's Number, rounded up for convenience to 150.

Of course the monkeys he observed in the wild didn't have computers.