Monday, January 25, 2010

Facebook F-Grade


Months ago I set up a Facebook page. I haven't really bothered with it since and every time I've visited it, I'm overcome with the 'noise' generated....requests to play this, respond to that...much of which I can quite honestly say I don' t have a clue how to respond to! Mafia Wars? Snowball fights? How? I'm Facebook ignorant and probably happy to stay that way.

In the end, I think (and I'm not I even did this correctly) I posted a notice saying that I was on 'L' plates with Facebook and unlikely to progress, so people should not take any non-response as a personal slight.

Some people I know with Facebook accounts have friends in the thousands. I think I remain on single digits. Today, I fool myself into some sense of 'being okay' having read about the Dunbar Number.

Oxford (coincidentally my home town) University Professor Robin Dunbar examined social groups from the villages of the past to modern-day urban environments and found that no matter how sociable we were, the part of our brains that handled interaction, defined as caring for and having interaction with more than once a year, could only process 150 friends.

Well, I fall way short of that. Not sure what that says about my cognitive processing.

What about you? Social network butterfly or social network caterpillar like me?

To read more on this subject, go here.

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