Attention Economy
Scientists validate Dunbar’s number in Twitter conversations; http://eicker.at/AttentionEconomy (via @paisleybeebe)
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Gerrit Eicker
Friends
Social network sites do not increase offline social network size or relations; http://eicker.at/Friends (via @gedankenstuecke)
Gerrit Eicker 07:31 on 7. June 2011 Permalink |
Goncalves, Perra, Vespignani: “Modern society’s increasing dependency on online tools for both work and recreation opens up unique opportunities for the study of social interactions. A large survey of online exchanges or conversations on Twitter, collected across six months involving 1.7 million individuals is presented here. We test the theoretical cognitive limit on the number of stable social relationships known as Dunbar’s number. We find that users can entertain a maximum of 100-200 stable relationships in support for Dunbar’s prediction. The ‘economy of attention’ is limited in the online world by cognitive and biological constraints as predicted by Dunbar’s theory. Inspired by this empirical evidence we propose a simple dynamical mechanism, based on finite priority queuing and time resources, that reproduces the observed social behavior. … Social networks have changed they way we use to communicate. It is now easy to be connected with a huge number of other individuals. In this paper we show that social networks did not change human social capabilities. We analyze a large dataset of Twitter conversations collected across six months involving millions of individuals to test the theoretical cognitive limit on the number of stable social relationships known as Dunbar’s number. We found that even in the online world cognitive and biological constraints holds as predicted by Dunbar’s theory limiting users social activities. We propose a simple model for users’ behavior that includes finite priority queuing and time resources that reproduces the observed social behavior. This simple model offers a basic explanation of a seemingly complex phenomena observed in the empirical patterns on Twitter data and offers support to Dunbar’s hypothesis of a biological limit to the number of relationships.”
Brooks: “If the thing that makes it real is your capacity to have a theory of mind relationship with a certain number of people, I can still imagine that social media would increase people’s capacities. … If [social media tools] succeed they will slowly break Dunbar’s number. … I would expect that Twitter would have a small number of people with a huge number of connections, but they’re not listening to that many people, they’re just talking to that many people.”