Mmm… Soylent Green
Back in the early days of what we eventually came to think of as Web 2.0, around the time Cluetrain was coming out, blogs were taking off. Kottke, Zeldman, Dooce, Mark Pilgrim and so on were all getting started. The sites were all hand-crafted, either running home-brew update scripts or just updated each day by hand. But that’s not the point.
The point is that there were so few of them that it felt like a community, even looking in from the outside. They would comment about each other’s posts — not comment on you understand, because comments weren’t invented then, but comment about. Various obsessions, memes if you will, would rise and fall.
It occurred to me that that’s what we’re crafting here on tumblr, and even on twitter. You don’t have to use tumblr or twitter (or your social-media platform du jour) in that way. But if you do, it feels cozy. There’s a rightness about it.
I don’t want to say this is a Dunbar’s number thing partly because I dislike the idea of quantifying relationships in that way and partly because I think it’s become too easy to quote a number that arose from a study of monkeys in the wild (or primates as my formerly primatologist PhD student reminds me) and apply it to humans sitting at a desk.
In a 1992 article, Dunbar used the correlation observed for non-human primates to predict a social group size for humans. Using a regression equation on data for 38 primate genera, Dunbar predicted a human “mean group size” of 148 (casually rounded to 150), a result he considered exploratory due to the large error measure (a 95% confidence interval of 100 to 230).
(via wiki, obviously. My bold added.)
You don’t get a community by throwing 150 people together and telling them: you’re all together, be interested in each other. It doesn’t work like that. The community finds an interest and then comes together.
Anyway.
