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This is the time of the year when I get flooded by well wishing messages. My birthday is on January second and through the many connections I have on social networks many people are aware of that and, kindly, send me a message. I got 3,000+ connections on LinkedIn, 1,500 friends on Facebook and many more linked via IEEE, Twitter…. you name it.
It started on the evening of January first, as it was already January second in Australia and the Far East and kept going till January 3rd as it was still January 2nd in the US. I tried to answer them all, even though at a certain point the gap between the message received and my answer grew wider and wider. A real avalanche.
Now, I have to say that just a tiny minority of those messages came from people whose names rung a bell. Most were from people that I accepted as friends on Facebook or transient acquaintances on LinkedIn, as result of some meetings. Why did I accept “friendship” on Facebook from people I do not know? Basically I am accepting requests from India and a few other Countries because there Facebook is the social media used for connecting with groups having a specific interest, in my case technology. As part of IEEE education endeavour I feel obliged to accept connections when I receive one (but I stopped accepting connection from “ladies” since they turned out to be a preliminary hook for subsequent harassment … so now I accept only requests with a clear indication of a technology interest).
I guess my situation is uncommon but I bet that many people have a digital social networks exceeding the Dunbar number that place in 150 (actually somewhere between 100 and 250) the maximum number of people a person can maintain stable relations. Notable, the average number of friends on Facebook is (as of September 2018) 155, of which people would trust (on average) only 4 if crises arise!!!!
The fact is that nowadays technology is offering us tools to maintain weak relations (relations with people you would seldom connect) hence the Dunbar number is no longer a thresholds of usefulness. Actually, as stated by the Small World theory, weak relations turn out to be even more important than stronger ones, particularly in technology and foresight studies where what you need is to get weak signals and integrate them into a overall picture.
Social relations have been constrained by distance, proximity was needed to establish and maintain them. Communications infrastructures have shrunk the distance and facilitate interaction but the Dunbar number is not about the external network, rather it is an hypotheses on the internal network, the one in our brain, that would be able to manage only a limited number of relations.
Well, this may be wrong after all. New technologies, web and artificial intelligence, may on one side provide the tools for seamless proximity and on the other side for cognitive boost. I noticed that with some interaction with a far away person that I “friended” in the past and never interacted with and all of a sudden through knowledge tools gets linked to a topic and I start interacting with that person on a common shared knowledge base.
In the coming decade I expect to see my social networks become much more dynamic, related not the personal interaction rather to joint interest on a topic. I would expect the rise of tools that can automatically create these dynamic social networks as more and more people will have a replica in the webspace (their own digital twin). These aggregation will take place in cities, in companies, in humanities and technology, driven not by a person but by a topic. Through my digital twin I will participate in several of those social circles and artificial intelligence agents will make sure I will be able to leverage and contribute.
For this year I think I managed to answer all the well wishing messages with a personal touch. It might be that in the future it will be impossible to do so. For the time being the fact that a person from around the world, I never met, felt compelled to hit a few keystrokes to wish me well gives me pleasure and makes me feel good about the technology that is enabling this.
