Bobo vendors in Burkina Faso (via Wikimedia)
I happened to bump into a friend of mine today - Nick Booth of Podnosh. Smart man. Social media expert about town.
We were talking about this book, and he happened to mention that he’d been reading a fair bit about evolutionary psychology over the past year or so. As you do.
It turns out that there’s a fairly well-supported theory that human beings hit a psychological ceiling when it comes to building relationships. You can handle about 150 people, then things get too complicated. Early communities would hit that ceiling, and then splinter off into other villages and tribes.
It’s not that one more relationship provides the straw that breaks the camel’s back - it’s that each additional relationship multiplies the complexity of the network. One more node on the network adds thousands more possible interconnections, and our brains just don’t handle it. Or at least, they couldn’t.
There is a direct, linear causal (non-evolutionary) theory that says the same must therefore apply to our online social networks. Make 151 friends on Facebook or MySpace, and you’ll experience psychological stress and have to take steps in order to cope.
But that seems not to be the case - and although it has a good deal to do with the fact that these online social networks do not consist exclusively of people that you have to manage on an up-close and personal, day-to-day basis that sharing a geographically defined space would necessitate, it also has to do with the fact that we have created tools for doing social “heavy lifting”.
Like the 150 friend limit of old, there was also a weight limit beyond which human beings simply could not lift. Picking up a rock much bigger than your average dog was not something we were evolutionarily equipped to handle. But with levers and pullies, we adapted. Now it seems there are very few things that humans can’t get from the bottom of a hill to the top.
Likewise with relationships. As we create tools in response to our limitations, the need to solve problems raised by the environments we find ourselves in and the technological opportunities at our disposal - the ceiling on all sorts of our abilities is raised. And, arguably, the quality of our engagement is impaired.
Just as the need not to expend energy to lift heavy objects means that we’re not automatically inclined to expend the sort of energy that make us fit and healthy physical specimens, it’s fairly convincing that the relationships we manage en masse are a bit on the weak and flabby side too.
Evolution is adaptation, not necessarily improvement.
I guess the workaround here would be to manage your hundreds of MySpace ‘friends’ using your digital levers and pullies - and do the social relationship equivalent of going to the gym in order to engage with your personal ‘village’.
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