Bart De Waele talks about using Twitter to boost his
Dunbar number in his recent post
Twitter op Radio 1 bij Peeters & Pichal. But what exactly is it?
Dunbar's number - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "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. [...] a commonly cited approximation is 150."
The word
stable, I think, is the most important one in this definition. Social networks and social media make it very easy to build relationships with (in my case) thousands of different people. But in many cases, these relationships change constantly: unfollowing and defriending are simply a matter of social network hygiene and a way to cope with the noise in the signal.
When a relationship becomes stable: that's when it starts to become interesting.
There have been a lot of discussions lately about what exactly a "friend" is if you have thousands of them on Facebook. But to me, my best friends are mostly the ones I've known the longest. And for all those interesting new people I've met through Facebook, The
Brussels Girl Geek Dinners, Twitter, LinkedIn,
Twunches, blog meetings etc and that I really like a lot: some of them I consider as friends. Most of them I consider as my audience. And I listen to them as part of their audience.
In case of doubt, I have
one definition of true friendship. If I would call or DM you in the middle of the night, saying "I'm in really deep shit..." without giving any details, I know who would simply reply with: "Where are you?" and help me pick up the pieces. And I know who would not pick up or react differently. That knowledge comforts me.
I'm an avid user and promotor of social networks, but I'm not there to boost my Dunbar number. I'm there to listen to, enter and start interesting conversations. I love getting comments, replies and retweets because they teach me how to become better at my job. And in some cases, how to try and be a better person.
Nikki Farquharson - Graphic Design & Illustration: "I wanted to capture the zeitgeist of today's western mentality with these revised expressions. Originally, I created approximately 40 expressions that I reduced to 26 for the alphabet. But I wanted to use them all and create even more to make a book."
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