As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been reading Scared To Death by Christopher Booker and Richard North. So you’d understand why I could not help but smile when I saw Randall Munroe’s latest over ca at xkcd:
Author: JP
Thinking more about Digital Dunbar Numbers
First of all, thanks for your comments on my previous post, where I posed the question on Digital Dunbar numbers. The views espoused helped me understand a little more about the area, led me down a few new garden paths, and led to a place where I could crystallise a little more of my own thinking of the subject.
Let’s start with my assertion that in a digital world, we can deal with bigger Dunbar numbers: not trivially bigger, but potentially multiple times bigger. Which is why I said I think I have a Dunbar number of around 300 right now. Why do I think this? Let me try and explain in my normal roundabout way.
How do I become friends with someone else? Usually it follows some sort of pattern. I start with not knowing the other person. We meet by spending time doing something or the other together, some narrow single-dimensional activity. Like work. A shared hobby, like contract bridge or billiards or folk music. A regular habit, like going to church, or the local pub. A common sport, like golf or squash.
The narrow single-dimensional activity can therefore be a source of new friends. But contact does not make friendship. What happens is that we spend time doing something together, and while we spend this time together, we get to know each other. Unintrusively. That’s important. Unintrusively.
This getting to know each other is actually a subtle discovery of some simple likes and dislikes, common interests, differences, habits and styles. And every now and then something happens, nothing you can describe easily. It’s not mechanical, not calculated, not planned, not predictable. You decide to do something else together. Share a meal, go to a movie. Meet each other’s families. Go to a poetry reading. Play golf. Something other than the activity that brought you together in the first place.
And so this narrow single-dimensional relationship starts widening. Becomes multidimensional. And again, every now and then, something happens, nothing you can describe easily. The ships that passed in the night decide to anchor closer together. And you become friends. Sometimes, again for no apparent reason, you stay friends for life.
Is that the way you see friendships happening?
I’ve never “planned” friendships, nor really tried to analyse what happens, so this is fresh ground for me. It appears that there is an introductory or “meeting” phase, a discovery or “getting-to-know-each-other” phase, and then something much harder, a “keeping-in-touch” phase. Without the keeping-in-touch the friendship withers and dies.
What I see happening in the digital world is this:
There are more meeting places. More markets where conversations take place. Search costs have reduced.
Deep discovery costs have reduced.The cost of discovering similarities and differences and common interests and habits and character is lower. You can find people with similar long-tail interests more easily.
Communications costs are lower; there are also many more ways to keep in touch. So the costs of keeping in touch are lower, and it’s easier to perform the rites of passage.
But all this would have meant nothing except for one more thing. Travel costs have reduced, international barriers have come down, people fly around much more than they used to. This is the catalyst. The catalyst for the capacity to increase Dunbar numbers.
I think I understand why I have a bigger Dunbar number. The digital world helps, but a digital world cannot by itself raise the Dunbar number. I make a point of spending time with people I know in the different cities and countries I visit on business; digital tools help me make this happen.
There’s something beyond this, something that Malcolm Gladwell touched upon in The Tipping Point. Weak interactions matter. Low-intrusion, protecting personal space.
So I think it’s become easier to make friends, easier to stay friends, provided the friendship in the digital world is reinforced by regular real-life meetings. Increased travel and the use of social media makes social interaction more effective, suggesting the possibility of raising the Dunbar number.
Follow the money
Deep Throat: Follow the money.
Bob Woodward: What do you mean? Where?
Deep Throat: Oh, I can’t tell you that.
Bob Woodward: But you could tell me that.
Deep Throat: No, I have to do this my way. You tell me what you know, and I’ll confirm. I’ll keep you in the right direction if I can, but that’s all. Just… follow the money.
All The President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein, 1974
Identity theft. Mmhmm. A term that hasn’t been around that long. Just what gets “stolen”? Maybe Mitchell and Webb can help us understand that: just watch this clip. [Thanks to Kevin Marks for giving me the tweet-up.]
Old Man’s River: Genghis Blues
Richard Feynman was a genius. He did many amazing things. One of the more unusual things he did in his life was to make gargantuan efforts to visit the Soviet republic of Tuva. Even more unusually, he failed to do this, held up by the politics and bureaucracy of the Cold War; papers permitting him to visit Tuva arrived the day after he died.
His attempts to visit Tuva are chronicled in the book Tuva or Bust. But that’s not all.
Recommendation 7: (film)
Genghis Blues. A film that won the Sundance Audience Award, was even nominated for an Oscar. The story of blind blues musician Paul Pena’s travels and travails en route Tuva, seeking to discover and sustain the mysterious art of “throat-singing”, otherwise called overtone singing or Khoomei. Done as a documentary, with real footage of Pena. And Feynman. And B.B.King.
Fascinating.
What have you changed your mind about?
That’s the subject of a very powerful set of essays published recently in the Edge World Question Center. I haven’t read all of them yet; I was working through them sequentially when I received an e-mail from Pat Kane of ThePlayEthic, pointing me at the answer given by Kevin Kelly. [Thanks, Pat, and I look forward to meeting you on Thursday.]
I loved it. And I suggest you stop whatever you’re doing and read it, now.
Some tidbits:
Everything I knew about the structure of information convinced me that knowledge would not spontaneously emerge from data, without a lot of energy and intelligence deliberately directed to transforming it. All the attempts at headless collective writing I had been involved with in the past only generated forgettable trash. Why would anything online be any different?
……….
How wrong I was. The success of the Wikipedia keeps surpassing my expectations. Despite the flaws of human nature, it keeps getting better. Both the weakness and virtues of individuals are transformed into common wealth, with a minimum of rules and elites. It turns out that with the right tools it is easier to restore damage text (the revert function on Wikipedia) than to create damage text (vandalism) in the first place, and so the good enough article prospers and continues. With the right tools, it turns out the collaborative community can outpace the same number of ambitious individuals competing.
……….
It has always been clear that collectives amplify power — that is what cities and civilizations are — but what’s been the big surprise for me is how minimal the tools and oversight are needed. The bureaucracy of Wikipedia is relatively so small as to be invisible. It’s the Wiki’s embedded code-based governance, versus manager-based governance that is the real news. Yet the greatest surprise brought by the Wikipedia is that we still don’t know how far this power can go.
……….
It is one of those things impossible in theory, but possible in practice. Once you confront the fact that it works, you have to shift your expectation of what else that is impossible in theory might work in practice.
……….
When you grow up knowing rather than admitting that such a thing as the Wikipedia works; when it is obvious to you that open source software is better; when you are certain that sharing your photos and other data yields more than safeguarding them — then these assumptions will become a platform for a yet more radical embrace of the commonwealth.
……….
Generation M is growing up knowing that Wikipedia works; to Generation M, it is obvious that open source software is better; Generation M, the Multimedia, Multitasking, Mobile Generation, is certain that sharing photos and other data yields more than safeguarding them.
Generation M understands what Kevin Kelly says here:
Both the weakness and virtues of individuals are transformed into common wealth, with a minimum of rules and elites. It turns out that with the right tools it is easier to restore damage text (the revert function on Wikipedia) than to create damage text (vandalism) in the first place, and so the good enough article prospers and continues. With the right tools, it turns out the collaborative community can outpace the same number of ambitious individuals competing.
In other words, for Generation M, or maybe the generation after that, the tragedy of the commons can be overcome, the free rider problem can be overcome, they have seen the promised land: The collaborative community can outpace the same number of ambitious individuals competing.
I have to repeat that. The collaborative community can outpace the same number of ambitious individuals competing.
Read it and weep. With joy. Because it is just possible that future generations may not have to put up with the trash that we have.