Keep Up With More 150 Friends?

By Jim Slaton

In the real world it would be hard if not impossible to keep up with more than 150 our your friends. The popularity of social networks on the internet have changed all that......or has it?

Dunbar's number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.

Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar's number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.

Dunbar's number was first proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who theorized that "this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size ... the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.

How many Facebook or Myspace friends do you have? 

How many Twitter followers do you keep up with?

If you have more than 150 friends then keeping up with them is probably starting to feel like a job!