Seth Godin Misunderstands Dunbar’s Number, And Stubs His Toe

Seth Godin recently wrote a post which hinges on Dunbar’s Number. Seth started out by misstating what Dunbar’s Number is, and then goes off the rails, predictably:

[via Dunbar’s Number isn’t just a number, it’s the law]

Dunbar’s number is 150.

And he’s not compromising, no matter how much you whine about it.

Dunbar postulated that the typical human being can only have 150 friends. One hundred fifty people in the tribe. After that, we just aren’t cognitively organized to handle and track new people easily. That’s why, without external forces, human tribes tend to split in two after they reach this size. It’s why WL Gore limits the size of their offices to 150 (when they grow, they build a whole new building).

But Dunbar never states that we are limited to 150 people that we can know, or even know pretty well.

Ok, slight problem. Dunbar’s Number represents the largest stable social group, 150 people more or less, where all the members not only know each other, but understand how each member is related to the others, and the nature of their social interactions.

Clearly, knowing that much about everyone is like the senior class at your high school, or all the people at a small company where you have been working for 10 years.

But Dunbar never states that we are limited to 150 people that we can know, or even know pretty well. Many connector types know thousands of people reasonable well: their work, their reputation, their accomplishments, perhaps even the name of their spouse (if any). It’s a well-known human skill.

Our limit is the 150-to-the-150th connections involved in a tight and bounded social network.

I maintain that we can repurpose the space in our head that might otherwise be dedicated to Dunbar, back when we lived in a Dark Age village or in a band of neolithic pastoralists.

So, the rest of Godin’s screed has no real anthropological basis:

Facebook and Twitter and blogs fly in the face of Dunbar’s number. They put hundreds or thousands of friendlies in front of us, people we would have lost touch with (why? because of Dunbar!) except that they keep digitally reappearing.

Reunions are a great example of Dunbar’s number at work. You might like a dozen people you meet at that reunion, but you can’t keep up, because you’re full.

Some people online are trying to flout Dunbar’s number, to become connected and actual friends with tens of thousands of people at once. And guess what? It doesn’t scale. You might be able to stretch to 200 or 400, but no, you can’t effectively engage at a tribal level with a thousand people. You get the politician’s glassy-eyed gaze or the celebrity’s empty stare. And then the nature of the relationship is changed.

I can tell when this happens. I’m guessing you can too.

Well, we can’t be ‘actual friends’ with thousands if we use Dunbar’s notion of a stable, closed social group. But since most of us are not living in that context, the notion that our contemporary sort of friendship isn’t ‘actual friendship’ is pretty empty of meaning.

Neotribalism isn’t going to take us back to the Stone Age. We will be living in a world of open, fluid networks, with an endless flow of possible contacts.

What we have is a world of open, unstable social networks. People come and go, most of our friends don’t know the rest, and we have incomplete knowledge about nearly everyone we know.

I agree in a small way with Seth: we can’t create closed and stable social groups with thousands of people. But that’s not what we are trying to do. We are creating ‘continuous partial friendship’, as David Weinberger called it. Our strongest ties remain strong, in this new world, but we have less of them, perhaps only a few dozen. What we do with the rest of our Dunbar neurons is up for grabs, but the obvious observation is that we are doing something with them: we are creating lots of weak ties with people that we only know in an incomplete way.

I start following someone on Tumblr, perhaps, knowing only that I like some photos he has posted. Over the course of the next weeks or months I learn more about him, and perhaps start following him on Twitter, where I learn even more. He may become a closer friend and we might meet, or I may lose interest and stop following him. I believe it is possible to have hundreds of these weak ties, perhaps even thousands, and to gain something from them.

What is gained through these weaker relationships is not the same as what comes from strong friendships, but then, weak ties are not replaceable by strong ones either. For example, most people meet future dates and mates through weak ties, because they open you up to a wider span of possible heartthrobs, and ones that may be from different locales, neighborhoods, or background. Hint: Ones you don’t know already.

Neotribalism isn’t going to take us back to the Stone Age. We will be living in a world of open, fluid networks, with an endless flow of possible contacts. The stuff in our heads we formerly used to keep track of kith and kin — who was in the turtle clan and who could marry into the crow clan — isn’t being used much in the West. We can reorient it to new uses, like keeping a partial awareness — an ‘ambient intimacy’, as Lisa Reichelt called it — of the most interesting thousand or so people we keep bumping into online.