What’s the Dunbar Number ? a basic Google search will lead you to Wikipedia, where you can find this definition

Dunbar’s Number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.

The Network size was and still an important topic to discuss, many researchers have tried to estimate the limit of a network size and they came with other estimation than the Dunbar’s one… but the all agree that this number is correlated to the neocretx size . it’s amazing though to find that Dunbar had even studied Gossip in evolutionary perspective …but it’s not the purpose of my today’s article.

A recent article in the Economist edition of the February 26th , reminded me of my problems dealing with my networks ( in real and “virtual” life) … I’ll try to explain my self..
I have always had a problem remembering people and the interconnection between them … during my first days at the university I had some courses with at least 200 other students… and I was and still  incapable to remember all of them .. and because of this handicap I have had so many embarrassing experiences in my life … the most embarrassing one occurred 3 or 4 years ago when a girl stepped on me and she was persuaded that we know each other very well … but I have just remembered her face  I was unable to gather any other information from my memory… she was very upset and left me without telling me who she was . This story is still haunting me… and 3 years after I don’t recall anything else about her ..

With the recent expansion of Social Networks, I thought that it will be much more easier now to recall the interconnections between those we know, and follow their life’s evolution with Tweets, status updates, picture they share, their professional profile in Linkedin etc … based on this assessment that social networks will make our life easier, I assumed that I can increase my Dunbar’s number easily..

I was really deceived when I figured out that we still humans behind all this technological stuff. The reality won the match by a strike , and all my dreams vanished … for real, we can’t maintain a close relationship with more than 30 persons at most…with 4 or 5 very close friends and relatives…. even if it’s your family you can spend weeks or months without hearing news from them…and surprisingly it doesn’t bother me.

All these facts may explain my sudden disaffection from Facebook… so many “friends” even if my profile don’t show up in public searches  … groups of friends with different degrees of limitation in what they see in my profile.. I have tried to get rid of some of them .. but I figured out that I didn’t add anyone in my network that I didn’t know IRL (in real life) before…I have a very little number of so called “friends” that I have never seen but at least I’ve spoken to them in other circumstances.

After all this dark description of my conception of the Limit in Social network’s size , I have a good news for my self : with Twitter combined with the right tool ( deck, apps, clients ) I can have less voyeurism, more interaction and a better network which sticks to my needs in present time.

So let’s tweet , by the way you can follow me @Moonsgirl.

For those who reached the bottom of this Post, you have this video as a reward enjoy ;)