Will Online Social Networking Sites Make Us Smarter?

Based on the whole Dunbar’s number concept, I did some extra reading on this idea and found that Robin Dunbar looked at primates and compared the size of their brains with humans. To cut a long story short, the larger the brain (or at least the neocortex area of it), the larger the average size of groups one can live in.

Human’s brains are larger than the primates obviously, yet with Dunbar’s number being around 150, does that also mean that Human brains hit a certain limit? That it simply cannot get any bigger? Perhaps with Social Networking sites it will. Perhaps the average size of groups with the online social networking addition can be 200, 500 or even 1000. Nevertheless, we may have to start measuring the average size of groups with a Dunbar 2.0 figure of maybe 700 (according to Dan Tapscott in “Grown Up Digital”, 2008).

You might think that maybe one doesn’t get smarter simply by having more friends surely? Well, think of it this way, say you have a group of friends called ‘group 1’, in ‘group 1’, you have two friends, friend A and friend B. In this group, you are unconsciously managing 3 relationships; your own relationship with friend A and friend B and what you know of the relationship between friend A and friend B excluding yourself. Simple enough so far, but what if you increase the number of friends in that group to 10, you now have to manage your own relationships with each individual and the pairs of relationships between your friends. As you can see, this will get horrendously exponential very quickly.

This applies in today’s world even more, with so many people flocking to online social networking sites and learning of ‘friends in common’ just adds to this. Making the concept of 6 degrees of separation a reality, perhaps not even 6 degrees, maybe less, perhaps 4 or 3 degrees, some suggest 2 degrees. With this smaller degree of separation, will this push our Dunbar number even further?

Like the song the Sherman Brothers once wrote for Disney, “It’s a small world after all”.