The Dead Weight of Social Networks
...or why Dunbar's number doubts you have 2000 friends on Facebook...
"Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation."
- George Washington (1732 - 1799)
We've all experienced social networks - the idea that a person's friends can be spun into a web for public viewing, and the general (arguably naive) assumption that the more people that person's linked to the more popular they are. Consider it PageRank but in a social context.
Theory: Just as you can tell how popular a website is by who links to it, the same goes for social networks...
You likely won't be surprised to hear I have some issues with that theory. Let's clear out the most obvious of the issues before we get into the deeper theory... Social whoring.
Friends from social whoring are in no way indicative of popularity or any other measure - if the only contact you've ever had with a person has been the "Accept" button then fundamentally they can't be considered a friend. Now that we have that ugly point out of the way...
A Limit to One's Circle
There's a fundamental limit to one's circle of friends - at least according to a theory. That theory's called Dunbar's number, and is meant to represent the maximum number of people someone can be in a relationship with. Specifically, "the kind of relationships that go with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person".
A commonly quoted figure for Dunbar's number is 150. Now whether or not this is accurate isn't of issue to us - we're exploring the more fundamental issue as to whether there's a limit to the number of friends we can have, or more specifically if the kinds of numbers we see on social networks are feasible.
To prove this we can approach it from a logical point of view. Understandably there is an overhead in maintaining a (continuous) friendship - the requirement that both parties interact with each other. As interaction requires time and a person has a finite amount of free time that means that there must be a limit to the number of friends one can maintain.
An interesting idea tangential to Dunbar's number is that of the Intercommunication Formula put forward by Fred Brooks (see The Mythical Man Month), where as you add people to a project the overhead of communication becomes greater.
This holds true for social circles as the number of people in them increases. Obviously not all friends need to speak to all other friends all of the time (as Brooks' formula, n(n - 1) / 2, suggests), but there must be some amount of interconnectedness. As the number of people in that social circle grows, being kept up to date and in communication with all of its members becomes increasingly difficult and the circle naturally begins to partition bits of itself off.
But what about technology?
There have been debates in recent times as to how technology may have affected Dunbar's number. With blogs and social networks people can essentially broadcast themselves - their health, thoughts and mood - to a large number of people. Isn't it possible that using this new technology we can effectively eliminate the prior overhead required in maintaining friendships?
The new media, broadcasting you as a channel...
In my opinion no. Understandably technology may allow us to communicate with unprecedented speed and to a far larger audience than ever before, but it can't remove the actual human interaction, which is our fundamental bottleneck. Without interaction those 'friends' are reduced to two televisions facing each other - they may be saying things but no-one's listening.
But can't we be friends... and more? ;)
"Go through your phone book, call people and ask them to drive you to the airport. The ones who will drive you are your true friends. The rest aren't bad people; they're just acquaintances."
- Jay Leno (1950 - )
What does all of this say? Well, in my mind you can still be above Dunbar's number, but you can't necessarily count them all as friends. To be accurate in such regards, social networks (and our interpretation of them) have to expand to consider the fact that not only do we have friends, but we also have acquaintances. Acquaintances deserve to remain on the social network, but it's possible there needs to be a distinction between them and an inner circle of friends.
Now this is of course a dangerous proposition. Social partitioning can be taken as quite an offensive gesture and is regardless difficult to measure with any sense of accuracy.
Facebook's dream of modelling our social lives
One could dream of an automated system that would understand our friendships and sort them or reinforce them as it deemed fit. There are many occasions when you'd still love to keep in contact with someone but you haven't realised how long it is since you spoke and that by the time you realise this it may be awkward to attempt a conversation again. If there was a system that prevented such dead weight from forming then wouldn't it be beneficial?
The major issue with such a dreamingly automated system is that our social lives cannot (at least at this point of time) be converted to such a beautiful social network. What social networks have access to is, at best, loose approximations of our interactions in the real world. This can be readily demonstrated by viewing a generalised idea of the online interactions between three types of friends, extremely close, close but removed (physically) and distant, and comparing them to our real life interactions with the same friends.
Extremely Close - RL high, Online low => Close - RL medium/low, Online medium/high => Distant - RL low, Online low
To online social networks, there is difficulty in automatically differentiating between the extremely close friend and the distant friend. With such a surplus of interaction in real life close friends usually feel little need to discuss things online.