Blog Post #4
Hi everyone!
In this post, I'd like to discuss The Dunbar Number and how applicable it is to today's social media users, particularly those who use Snapchat. According to the Dunbar Number, human social networks typically have 150 members. Four categories—close friends, good friends, friends, and acquaintances—are used to classify the 150 people in this list. There can only be 15 people in the category of good friends. This group is reserved for those individuals who you communicate with frequently and who are too consistent with you to be classified as a friend or acquaintance. Nowadays, social networking apps like Snapchat compel users to have a wide variety of people they communicate with every day because of the way the software is designed. Snapchat streaks are a feature on Snapchat that involves sending someone a photo or video back and forth on both ends at least once every day to start a streak that counts how many days in a row you both snapped back and forth. I could argue that nearly everyone in this class, including myself, used to have a pretty extensive list of Snapchat streaks while we were all in high school. The average number of streaks teenagers used to have at the peak of high school is probably about 40 or so individuals. Dunbar would be able to refer to each of them as a good friend at this stage given the frequency of your communications. However, this number exceeds the initial estimate of 15 people for the good friend category by a significant margin. Social media apps such as Snapchat brings a wide range of people considerably closer together online and motivates many people to stay in touch as frequently as possible. Due to this, it appears that the Dunbar Number is obsolete in the age of social media and is less important than it once was, prior to the advent of internet communication.
- Crisilla
Hi,
ReplyDeleteGreat discussion! You make an excellent point about Snapchat and its user’s activities, such as streaks. Many of its users would have more streaks than they would actually consider being close friends with. Most often, they would capture moments of their day similar to photos taken on BeReal. I found the purpose of it was to keep in contact with more people than you would outside of social media. I can say that Dunbar’s number is not necessarily obsolete; instead, we view vast online connections deeper than they actually are.
Do you think the quality of connection we have is less or greater with the advent of technology?
Thanks,
Pooja
Great discussion, I enjoyed reading your post! However, I would actually argue that this form of communication on Snapchat is not quite up to the standard of what Dunbar meant. When he classified this group of close friends as those who you communicate with frequently, he was likely referring to a more personal form of communication. From my experience with Snapchat, while I maintain "streaks" with a large number of people, I rarely spoke to many of them. In fact, many of them I had never met or spoken to at all. I am curious what your thoughts are on this, do you think that Dunbar would label all of these people as good friends?
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