Friday, March 28, 2003

Social Capacity of 150. In the Ecosystem of Networks, 150 is the defining limit of Social Capacity at the Social Network layer.  Steve Mallett  comments on the Rule of 150 and Communities, saying that recognizing this natural limit can enhance community design. ...The Tipping Point's take on 150: Quoting Dunbar (pg 179): "The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us. Putting it another way, it's the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happend to bump into them at a bar." There then goes on to be several examples of how social groups (religious and working) are a better unit if split whenever one group grows beyond that magic number of 150 members. To grasp the idea of 150 Gladwell suggest we think about our phone numbers. They are seven digits because seven digits is all we can handle: Quoting Miller (pg. 176): "There seems to be some limitation built into us either by learning or by the design of our nervous systems, a limit that keeps our channel capacity in this general range" At the time of reading Tipping Point I thought this was a pretty intriguing mystery, wondering why 150 in the case of groups of people? Or as Gladwell puts it as our 'Social Capacity". I'm still reading through Emergence: The Connected Life of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, but I ran into the number 150 again when reading about human's natural tendency to imagine other people's mental states: "That power (imagining other's mental states) came in the form of brain mass: more neurons to model the behavior of other brains, which themselved contained more neurons, for the same reason. It's a classic case of positive feedback, only it seems to have run into a ceiling of 150 people, according to the latest anthropological studies. We have a natural gift for building theories of other minds, so long as there aren't too many of them." Steve goes further to observe the limits of Social Capacity in blogspace: ...I've found that bloggers are outpacing slashdot for innovative topics and conversation and I don't think it's the blogging mechanisms that achieve that as much as the natural selection of bloggers they connect with. The number of blogs that I read hovers around 150. Beyond that many start to contain the same voice as others and/or are equal replacements for ones in my list already and so don't add any value. I might swap some blogs out and others in as my interests change, but yep, 150 is about right.... This social channel capacity is something that online communities should strongly think about and play with to see what happens. I'm willing to bet that the conversations and relationships will be much richer and healthier for it. P.S. Bloggers, go count Doc Searl's 'blogroll'. Give or take ten for link-rot and you'll find an interesting number. [Ross Mayfield's Weblog] We are getting close - none of this insight is currently embedded in any formal way in how we design organizations. There is a big debate about bullying at school on PEI. Is not understanding this part of the cause when we have schools that have hundreds or even thousands in one unit? Why are bureaucracies so rule bound and so painful to work in? Is it that we organize beyond real social limits and hence have to micro-manage? Hey Ross keep going on this 1:30:33 PM    comment []

Blogging - The New Family and the Death of June Cleaver Searching for the Family I have been working on a research proposal to study the family and had this aha at least an aha for me today. Does the family exist anymore? So here are my musings ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If we really look at the data for North America (WASPS) the family as we think of it is already dead! What I mean by the "family" is a two parent unit with at least one grandparent so that there are three generations involved all providing value to each other as a social unit in a rough world. We think that this is the family and I suspect that we think that we should hold this up as a model. Little knowing of course that for more than 4 million years we raised our children and did our work in a small 30-5 person unit that combined work and society called a tribe. Little knowing that all primates except us still use this arrangement. My aha was maybe that .our search for June Cleaver is getting in the way of the fact that June is dead and was never a good model anyway I wonder if looking for June obscures a possible return to the tribe and the deinstitutionalization at last of our western society?   What are the remnants of June today? What is the reality today? Most WASP families ( Most immigrant families still adhere to the larger extended model - by the way look at how much better their kids are doing at school) have only one parent - female (why are boys in trouble?) Very few have a grandparent in the mix and most grandparents are often not even in the same city. Elderly parents are also increasingly institutionalized.I fear that our society is becoming a society of one who interacts only with institutions and not with real people.   Children our greatest asset have become for most of us a huge economic drain. In their younger years they go to expensive daycare, they demand fashion and toys and have a closer connection to TV than to any other influence. As teens they need even more economic support: on PEI every teen has to have a car. If they go onto university the drain is even greater. Then after a few years on their own they often return home - sometime as single parents - and seek to be looked after all over again!!!! When do our children grow into adults? No wonder our wasp birthrate is below replacement. That itself is a sign of a powerful set of forces.   Tell that I am exaggerating. What do the stats tell us?   So long as we assume that the June Cleaver Family is alive, we think that we can and should go back to it. We feel guilt but we know that we cannot go back.  So long as I feel that I should be somehow living my grandparent's life, I am stuck. Here is the aspiration aspect - We want to strive for a better social unit. We can see a new model in business - the Wal- Mart response model. Can we see the new family emerging????? It must be but so long as we think that the old family is it, we won't be able to see the new one.   Be assured that a new unit is emerging and will emerge. If we can describe it, it will become real for many people very quickly - they will aspirationally jump to a model that works. The prize is a big one for us as people, for business and for our nation.   This may then end the idea that we are only a disconnected individual whose only relationships are at work, whose children are in daycare and whose parents are in a home and whose protector is the state. For I sense that it is our growing dependence on institutions that has played a major role in why the 1950's family has collapsed - it may also be worth studying these trends as well. It is surely important to know why we have come to this.   Putnam blames work and TV. He sees TV as a relationship blocker and as a community influence that drives a world of things over relationships and a world of passivity over exploration. I include for blame our school system where we teach the institutional Cartesian model as the main curriculum and where we deny all that we know about primate learning process. Kids who don't fit are drugged. (30%?) I blame Daycare where we rely on a few strangers to park our small children at the most important learning period of their lives. Most of all we need to ask ourselves about the pull of the workplace out of the home where work has replaced most other relationships and has broken the bond of parent child and in many cases between spouses. Why have we put away all other relationships for those at work?   I bet that we are going to find that the tribe (a combined social and economic unit) is emerging again. You see this is the idea of Free Agent Nation where up to 50 million North Americans have left the traditional workplace and work for themselves mainly at home and who have set up networks of support for both work and social issues such as their kids and parents. I feel this among many of blogging out there who have built working relationships out of personal relationships. I have been touched at the help that I have received from many of you and I feel good that I can reach out in a way that is not possible in the traditional work place. I sense that blogging will itself create little tribes of co workers who also really care for each other. The more we work at home, the more we interact in a tribal way with our kids. I work with my son - it is my greatest joy. mainly he teaches me.   Daniel Pink I think provides us with a model for finding the new family. Pink himself went around America and discovered this group, saw its common elements and gave it a label. All of us who live like this suddenly understood what we were  doing and how to do this better. We have a model and with a model we have power.   His book is having a profound impact as it enables individuals who thought that they were alone to see that theory make up a pattern. I suspect that the new family is located in this group who have healed the breach between work and life and who aspire to a living and not a paycheck. These people reject all institutions as do most of our kids. I wonder if we looked with fresh eyes that we might see that for many of us  - a new family based on the tribe is emerging and that it is something that if we talk about more, will become more clear and more helpful 11:19:55 AM    comment []