Who is your 150?
By
Seth Godin says you can only have 150 friends in his recent blog post.
“Dunbar postulated that the typical human being can only have 150 friends. One hundred fifty people in the tribe. After that, we just aren’t cognitively organized to handle and track new people easily. That’s why, without external forces, human tribes tend to split in two after they reach this size. It’s why WL Gore limits the size of their offices to 150 (when they grow, they build a whole new building).”
What about Facebook, Twitter, and the like? Do these social media tribes really connect us to hundreds, thousands of friends?
“Some people online are trying to flout Dunbar’s number, to become connected and actual friends with tens of thousands of people at once. And guess what? It doesn’t scale. You might be able to stretch to 200 or 400, but no, you can’t effectively engage at a tribal level with a thousand people. You get the politician’s glassy-eyed gaze or the celebrity’s empty stare. And then the nature of the relationship is changed.”
In our pursuit of online allies, Godin cautions us to build strategically. Making friends is easy. Keeping all of them, however, can be a challenge.
