A new study by Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary anthropology at Oxford University, suggests social networking sites cannot increase the number of “meaningful relationships” any single person can have. 

 

People are capable of managing only a maximum of only 150 friendships, the study finds, confirming other studies that also suggest there is a finite limit to “meaningful” relationships any single person can sustain, with or without the existence of social networks.

 

That is not to say such networks are not useful in increasing the number of more-casual relationships a person can support. But at some level, when the number of members of any social network becomes too great, it ceases to be a face-to-face replacement and becomes another mass media format. 

 

The suggestion that social networks are largely “mass media” once they grow beyond several hundred members does not mean they are not useful for such purposes. It is to suggest that social networks simultaneously are “personal,” “casual” and “mass” media.

 

Dunbar suggests that while social networking sites allow us to maintain more relationships, the number of meaningful friendships is the same as it has been throughout history.

 

Dunbar developed a theory known as “Dunbar’s number” in the 1990s which claimed that the size of our neocortex, the part of the brain used for conscious thought and languagem, limits us to managing social circles of around 150 friends, no matter how sociable we are.

 

These are relationships in which a person knows how each friend relates to every other friend. They are people you care about and contact at least once a year.

 

Dunbar derived the limit from studying social groupings in a variety of societies, from neolithic villages to modern office environments, and has found that people tend to self-organize in groups of around 150. Social cohesion begins to deteriorate as groups become larger.

 

Dunbar is now studying social networking websites to see if the “Facebook (News - Alert) effect” has stretched the size of social groupings. Preliminary results suggest it has not.

 

“The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world,” says Dunbar.

 

One conclusion that might be drawn from the research is that social networking is an unusual communication format. It can, up to a point, be a substitute for face-to-face interaction between “real friends.” It can enlarge the number of causal relationships a single person can maintain.

 

At the same time, social networks also function as traditional mass media, a one-to-many communications channel. That is one reason many organizations, firms and products now are marketed using social networks.  In that sense, what is truly new about social networks is both that they allow friends to stay in contact, but mass medium.