We have covered Dunbar at uni and I really enjoyed reading your post about it, and I like how you have applied it to another interest of mine; social media.

I had thought about doing a similar post, but you seem to have covered the topic rather well; so will leave it up to the professionals.

What I’d really be interested in looking at is how the speed of communication changes the number. I think that Dunbar – or the peer review of Dunbar’s paper – referred to tracking Christmas card lists as a means of measuring group size. However, how does the number of people you can keep up with change as you embrace faster means of communication such as mobile phones, email, IM, social network tools and twitter? It’d be an interesting one to look at – I suspect there might still be a ‘hard plateau’ set by the neocortex size, but quite how culture and language interact with this, I’ve no idea.

Pulling up a record of the communication thread helps, that’s one of the reasons CRM systems can be so useful for a business. However, that’s different that remembering “Hey, George would be interested in this”.

Does technology expand how many people we can (or more importantly do) interact with? I’d be very interested to hear what Adam Greenfield has to say… The topic is something JP was pondering in the post Sam mentions on Confused of Calcutta here.

@sam Time is still the oxygen of friendship, certainly, and I’ll give a hearty nod to the comment on how much brain capacity we use, which leads me to…

@farham The brian is like a massively parallel computer processor. Trying to measure use in %’s is problematic. There is always the opportunity to learn new things and form new neural pathways. More recent research suggests that the brain’s plasticity (its ability to change and adapt) lasts longer into life that previously thought.

There is a huge opportunity to use technology to enhance and sustain relationships – either in the business or personal context. Social software is starting to explore some of the boundaries, but only starting.

My hunch was simply that what really matters most in terms of preserving relationships is time; we need a certain amount of time to invest in our various relationships in order to maintain them.

I also wonder if perhaps statistics about how much brain capacity we use are really just exposing our lack of knowledge about how the brain works as much as anything else.

Thanks for the great article.

this is a great post. Really really great stuff. thanks.

One of the significant factors in the advantage of social networking and its influence on functional community size is the ability to instantaneously bring up a record of prior communications. People that I don’t immediately remember can be easily refreshed to my memory by trawling through my email or twitter archive to find out what we’ve said in the past. ‘ah yes, THAT dave’ etc… suddenly, the prompts become vital to maintaining a more disparate group of connections, with context and depth, without needing to keep it all at the front of our minds all the time.

As mobile tech gets more and more sophisticated I wonder if we’ll learn to utilize this more and more. There are certainly some scary/nefarious uses of that kind of instant search functionality, but I think the pros outway the cons.

I’d love to hear Adam Greenfield’s take on how the ‘search to strengthen community’ aspect of ubiquitous computing might pan out… will ask him. :)

I agree with you that “virtual’ worlds break those sorts of limitations. We’ve only be using text as a real-time communication method for a relatively few years, so we’ll see how that changes conversations too. I’ll come back to the 2% of the brain bit, as that is a whole other post about neurons and parallel processing :).

I still think there is a time investment required to maintain relationships. Modern marketing has to grapple with how that can be scaled (likewise, modern approaches to sales). From a the perspective of personal relationships, I wonder if trying to scale is the right direction. Better to focus on strengthening perhaps?