Blog Post #4

 For this weeks blog post I have decided to look at something similar to what we looked at within our midterm assignments. I am looking at Dunbars theory and Standage and how he suggests that “at some point in prehistory humans shifted away from physical forms of grooming and began to groom each other in another way: through speech, and specifically the exchange of ‘social information’”. The most direct piece of evidence that Standage offers in support of this link is the “Dunbar number,” or the number that Dunbar concluded should be the average group size for humans relative to the size of the human neocortex: That number is 150. 

    With this being said Standage goes out of his way to state that the vast majority of Facebook users only have about 120-130 friends. To add on that Dunbar suggest that the usual number that we hang around with it roughly around 50 or so people. Dunbar’s research reveals that “our brains were literally made for social networking” But this brings us to the idea is if we have this many friends within our circle if they are really authentic and real friends to us. For example, if we go through our current followers now and friends within any social media apps and look how close are we actually with all of them. It is quite interesting to look at friends and followers count as most times we have mutual friends with these people and don't actually know them. Bringing back the idea that Dunbar brings out, which states we are made for social networking. Do you believe with this statement from Dunbar? Should we look more into the friends we have on social media and give it a second look?