It’s alright to have a high-minded concept now and again.
It’s also okay to be occasionally right.
But is it okay to be right for the wrong reasons?
The Road Less Traveled
I saw a promotional post touting a new social network called “Path.” Path wants to beat Facebook by being smaller. You see, Facebook is just too much, and there are too many people, and you can’t possibly know them all that well, and there are people who aren’t even people who you might not want to share things with.
I get that, I really do.
Path will limit you to 50 friends instead of 5,000, because that limits it to who really matters:
Path allows you to capture your life’s most personal moments and share them with the 50 close friends and family in your life who matter most.
Because your personal network is limited to your 50 closest friends and family, you can always trust that you can post any moment, no matter how personal. Path is a place where you can be yourself.
I agree completely. Yet Path is wrong on two very important counts.
Done With Dunbar
Path has tapped into a very interesting sentiment, that we’re not all ready for a totally public world, and that there’s safety in the familiar. The idea of sharing with a smaller number of people is enticing, to say the least.
Where they lose me is with their attempt to use science as part of the sale.
Again, from Path’s introductory post:
We chose 50 based on the research of Oxford Professor of Evolutionary Psychology Robin Dunbar, who has long suggested that 150 is the maximum number of social relationships that the human brain can sustain at any given time. Dunbar’s research also shows that personal relationships tend to expand in factors of roughly 3. So while we may have 5 people whom we consider to be our closest friends, and 20 whom we maintain regular contact with, 50 is roughly the outer boundary of our personal networks. These are the people we trust, whom we are building trust with, and whom we consider to be the most important and valued people in our lives.
Actually, it would have been better for them to be honest:
“We chose 50 based on popular misinterpretations of the research by Oxford Professor of Evolutionary Psychology Robin Dunbar, who has long suggested that 150 is the maximum number of social relationships that the human brain can sustain at any given time under a given tribe-centric circumstance.
There… that’s a little better.
The alleged Dunbar Number has been pitched around so much by social media knuckleheads that you don’t even need to go to the original research. If you did, you’d be astonished at the game of Telephone that has radically altered the popular meaning.
Dunbar’s hypothesis, never proven, is that there is an upper boundary for our notion of community, based on the size of our cerebral cortex. (I’m talking humanity, not our own individual brains.) Dunbar’s idea is that the neocortex limits us to a complete understanding of a community of a given size. The “complete understanding” is the key here.
He did not say you could only have 150 friends… he said that 150 is the highest number of people you could know where you also knew all of the ways in which they interacted and knew each other.
Simply put, the Dunbar Number is the size of the high school graduating class where everyone can still be all up in everyone else’s business, and know who slept with whom, and which kids shakes down the others for help with their Geometry homework.
Path gets it wrong, horribly.
Paging Sybil
I grew up in Idaho, and have a few friends from that time in my life.
There are a couple dozen people from my church on my Facebook.
I know some really clever communicators and I share things of interest to them, and they reciprocate.
I’m connected to dozens of my close friends still doing great work for the American Red Cross, and with those who I’ve trained and trained with in Kung Fu.
But Path wants me to have 50 friends. Period.
I think it’s a mistake to try and cater to “the real Ike,” especially when half of my friends first knew me as Isaac. Yes, I am a complicated person, but aren’t we all?
Oversharing is a real issue, and it’s easy to turn people off with pictures of the vacation nobody cares about, or photos of the family members that we didn’t know you had. And it’s also a mistake to assume that my closest 50 Best Friends will all know or care, either. Because they are as fractured and multiply-enabled as I am. The Isaac who studies Kung Fu and the Ike who writes about communications does indeed overlap with the Isaac who has watched every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer — but will I need another social network for just the people who understand my analysis of Buffy’s rhetorical banter prior to delivering spinning heel-kicks?
Um… no.
There is only one me, but there are many parts to me. Why not just let me share those parts with the people who care about that part of me?
Redundancy, Once More With Feeling
Which begs the question: Why do I need Path?
I can already divide the different parts of Me among different lists. Facebook Lists are easy to set up, and I can direct church-related stuff to the flock, family pictures to the immediate family, and articles about failed social media networks to those who care.
The Holy Grail of social media will be discovering how to bake Relevance into the system. But until that pre-packaged recipe arrives on my shelf, I can still cook that from scratch for my friends, by being smarter about how I share what with whom. And odds are, you can too.
Path is a great idea, wrapped up in justifications so misguided and incorrect that I may just have to recommend the paths more traveled.
