Wiser minds than me have been blogging about Dunbar during the week including Matt Rutherford who introduced me to it. Anything that JP Rangaswami is involved in is usually worth a read.
Your Digital Dunbar Number comes from the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar who suggests that 150 is the maximum number of people with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships. That theoretical limit is known to sociologists and anthropologists as Dunbar’s number.
Matt reckons his is about 120 and I was going to say the same until I looked at what Dunbar classifies the "stable social relationship" as. It turns out it's
the kind of relationships that goes with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person
What do you think your Dunbar number is? Paul Walsh, yours must be 500? more?
Honestly Steve, I think it would reach 500, easily. My Facebook and Twitter connections aren't reflective of real life for me. Quite a lot of people I know don't yet use those tools. In fact, I was responsible for introducing many of my Facebook connections to that medium.
I'd imagine yours and JP's is high too.
150 in my opinion is for loners ;)
http://www.mulley.net/2008/01/03/dunbar-revisited-1478/
Wrote about this recently as it happens, I think we can boost that number thanks to tech
Steve,
I think that these numbers are pretty relevant, but also that they depend on the social position of someone within a network. And that they are most likely applied to a person who is not engaged in global social networking, nor active in a public position.
Look at it from -let's say- an evangelist's point of view. The longer you are in the running, the more people you meet and the larger your user group audience becomes. You interact with a lot of people. I'm not saying you take home 50 new connections every time you present, but at least 1 or 2 are remaining connections.
That said, looking at someone in your position, it's normal to cross that 150 border.
Look at people like Scoble, Raftery, Kawasaki, Calacanis, MacLeod, Rubel... they most score waaaay over 500.
Just my two cents, but as Damien says, technology boosts that number exponentially. Not to mention being in a somewhat more public position.
not sure it's as simple as that Miel as I take the "knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person" quite literally and not sure I can say that about the long list of folks i know. agreed it's much higher than 150 though because of the new mediums
Steve I agree. It's one thing to know a lot of people, it's another thing to be known by a lot of people. But it's an entirely different matter to sit in both camps and understand what each has in common. Then the icing on the cake is the ability to connect those people before they know themselves, what they have in common.
Make sense? Probably not :)