What About The Weak Ties?

Once again, people are missing the most important aspect of Twitter community in their endless confirmation of Dunbar’s constant:

KFC, Human Brain Limits Twitter Friends To 150

[…] it’s easy to imagine that social networking technology finally allows humans to surpass the Dunbar number.

Not so say Bruno Goncalves and buddies at Indiana University. They studied the network of links created by 3 million Twitter users over 4 years. These tweeters sent each a whopping 380 million tweets.

But how to define friendship on Twitter. Goncalves and co say it’s not enough simply to follow or be followed by somebody for there to be a strong link.

Instead, there has to be a conversation, an exchange of tweets. And these conversation have to be regular to be a sign of a significant social bond, so occasional contacts don’t count.

Goncalves and pals used these rules to reconstruct the social network of all 3 million tweeters and studied how these networks evolve.

It turns out that when people start tweeting, their number of friends increases until they become overwhelmed. Beyond that saturation point, the conversations with less important contacts start to become less frequent and the tweeters begin to concentrate on the people they have the strongest links with.

So what is the saturation point? Or, in other words, how many people can tweeters maintain contact with before they get overwhelmed? The answer is between 100 and 200, just as Dunbar predicts.

“This finding suggests that even though modern social networks help us to log all the people with whom we meet and interact, they are unable to overcome the biological and physical constraints that limit stable social relations,” say Goncalves and co.

The bottom line is this: social networking allows us to vastly increase the number of individual we can connect with. But it does nothing to change our capability to socialise. However hard we try, we cannot maintain close links with more than about 150 buddies.

a cognitive limit of 150±50 close friendships does not diminish the power of Twitter, which is derived from amplifying the power of weak ties, not strong ones.

A lot of slippery wordage here by KFC, like ‘maintain contact with’, which is not used in the most general sense, but in some exclusive, close friend sense. Bruno Goncalves and his colleagues merely sought confirmation of the Dunbar Constant, in terms of close connections, not whether or not we limit our contacts to 150±50.

But what about Twitter’s ability to increase the number of weak ties we have? Let’s take the Dunbar Constant as a given, in terms of the number of close relationships possible: strong ties. But Mark Granovetter made the his assertion about the the power of weak ties, saying that weak ties make a community rich because they allow the interaction between people that are dissimilar in background, opinions, or connections. A world made up of only strong ties would be highly fragmented, with tight groups of highly similar individuals. It is exactly the capability of Twitter to allow us to have more weak ties at a lower cost that makes it such a powerful medium.

Also, Damon Centola makes the case for networks based on weak ties being more socially dense, and therefore creating a better context for the diffusion of innovative ideas and practices.

So, studies that demonstrate — once again — that we converge on a cognitive limit of 150±50 close friendships does not diminish the power of Twitter, which is derived from amplifying the power of weak ties, not strong ones.

I expect that we will see a great deal of dismissive hand waving as a result of this research, saying more or less that all the other connection on Twitter, past the 150±50 strong ties, is worthless, a waste of time, and immature. But this will be wrong, and not supported by the evidence in this and other studies.