Stephen PrenticeSo (according to various news reports) Stephen Fry now has more than 63,000 followers on Twitter. Well bully for him! Here we have one of the great theatrical and comic talents of our time, who is finding a use for Twitter as a means of reaching out to his audience, or maybe he is simply jumping on the band-wagon. But with a successful stage career in progress I hope that he has not fallen prey to the unfortunate tendency of measuring his value by the number of friends in his social network. Surely we are better than that! Twitter has it’s detractors, but it also has it’s value, and the problem lies not with the technology but the obsession we seem to have developed with the number of people in our social network.
Social and anthropological research shows that social groups are unstable beyond a couple of hundred (actually 150 or so in the case of Dunbar, or as much as twice that in the case of the more recent Bernhard-Killworth, see this wiki entry). So any concept of having a relationship with 60,000 or more is a little unlikely!
Perhaps that other comic genius Groucho Marx was right when he said “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member!”.
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Category: Behaviour Tags: dunbar's number, social network
