capacity
While having a brew recently I noticed a man conversing. His voice stood out for me and I couldn’t figure out why so I invited him and his friend to our table.
Micheal said he is a tennis instructor. I explained that I once took tennis lessons about 15 years ago and what a great experience it was. After about thirty minutes of chatting about many different things something dawned on me. I said “As a matter of fact my instructor was black…”. He said grinning, “Yes, that’s right, in fact I’m the only black tennis instructor in the region”. At that point I figured out the the gentlemen was MY tennis instructor.
How on earth could it have taken me thirty minutes to figure out that I had run into my tennis instructor?
capacity
This is a brain capacity issue. In this case it’s a specific capacity to retain and manage social data. In a nutshell because the brain has a limited capacity it needs to dispose of data. If it didn’t do this, we would be remembering everything. Our brain disposes of data using an algorithm that includes frequency of use and last time of use for an element of data.
In this case, I’m not in tennis anymore so the connection lost whatever relevancy it had and eventually my brain threw it out of the fast memory.
Our ability to have social ties is limited.
Robin Dunbar studied stone age (and other) villages and came up with a tendency towards having a population of about 150. This has become known as the Dunbar Limit. Many people quote this as a limit of the number of ties that one can manage which isn’t really the same thing as group size.
Other researchers came up with a number of social ties to have an upper limit somewhere around 300.
Either way, limits of our social capacity is an important observation.
You may wonder about your address book which has 500 people in it, or peoples’ facebook profiles with large numbers of friends.
If you just think of these as connections and not friends then it makes more sense. For instance you will have obsolete listings in your address book. Also in facebook, there will be a lot of connections over which there isn’t much happening. So they’re not necessarily friends (despite facebook’s silly naming convention).
capacity
With more competition due to expanding world population and more social tools to help manage connections and information sharing, there may be a call for humans to manage more connections.
I often argue that tools such as Twitter, Facebook and such allow us to manage our weaker ties better. So in fact increased management of ties could be happening through the use of social tools.
But even with an increase in the number of ties we can manage, there is still a limited amount of time to share information, socialize and collaborate with people. So we wind up spreading ourselves thinly over a larger number of people.
Perhaps this will help us predict what sorts of social tools may emerge. New ways to manage this information and collaborate are clearly in our future.
Hi Bill,
Thanks for the comment.
You make a great point. Our brains can handle some things very effectively. But social capacity comes forward as a limit often since we are pushing this limit.
Being introduced to a new person would have been a rare occurrence thousands of years ago. Now it happens very regularly.
Darcy
What amazes me is how we seem to remember somethings so well, like music or places we have been. Other things we seem to be able to forget so easily, like names.
Bill Kuhl