Here’s the reason Facebook’s plan to allow individual user’s to share everything makes no sense and will ultimately fail. The simple answer is it’s not humanly possible.

When computers and software work well, they augment behaviour which humans are actually capable of in the offline world. That means they walk along side us and help us. A turn signal helps me. I don’t need to manually flick the lever up and down, up and down, etc. Cruise control helps me. Facebook allowing me to have thousands of ‘friends’ that I share my intimate life with doesn’t help me, because it’s not humanly possible for me to have thousands of friends. There’s a limiter and it’s called the human brain. There’s even a fancy term for this:

“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.”

What happens when you try to go beyond Dunbar’s number?

“Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive 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 theory is that this is a physical limit imposed by MY BRAIN:

“the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained. On the periphery, the number also includes past colleagues such as high school friends with whom a person would want to reacquaint themselves if they met again”

So if Dunbar’s number is correct then facebook could help me with maintaining “more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms” once I go beyond my 150. That’s how facebook’s helping me right? Even if the number’s off by 100%, that’s 300. I don’t even consider myself an active user of facebook and I currently have 285 ‘friends’.

The reality is the opposite, that facebook and others makes it all but impossible for an individual NOT to smash through Dunbar’s number. Look, we’ve all done the equivalent of sticking our employer’s cheese up our nose. This isn’t a question of privacy or whether stupid acts exist in the world, or eliminating stupid acts. Do you honestly want to live in a world where people don’t do stupid stuff? This is about what’s humanly possible. Were it not for a myriad of tools facilitating the breaching of Dunbar’s number, then the close friends of these Domino’s staff would have laughed about the cheese in their nose until one finally said “that’s stupid, stop it, you’re being an ass” and they ‘d have stopped. Done.

I worry about a world where my kids can’t actively make mistakes and do stupid stuff, learn and move on. I was afforded that, and hopefully still am, and my character is likely far more built on the stupid stuff I lived through rather than the safe, acceptable stuff I managed to intersperse it with. If you agree our kids deserve that then you’d best quickly realize we’re all kids in some fashion and we all need this.

The clear answer is facebook isn’t helping with any of this and has no intention of it. In fact it’s quite the opposite, “The most important thing to understand about Facebook is that you are not Facebook’s customer, you are its inventory. You are the product Facebook is selling. Facebook’s real customers are advertisers.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 at 2:26 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.