<a href="http://www.halfwaytonormal.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/399654169_c8a2d8fd76.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-270" title="399654169_c8a2d8fd76" src="http://www.halfwaytonormal.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/399654169_c8a2d8fd76.jpg" alt="" width="472" height="312" /></a>
<h5 style="padding-left: 300px;">Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/eme06/">curly_exp(l)osure</a></h5>
OK, I give in. I'll write about numbers in social media. Again.

First I got this question in response to my 25 question post: "Of the 255 'friends' listed for you on facebook, how many/what percentage are actually friends?"

Dennis, who asked the question (and who happens to be a friend—like the real life kind) also sent me a link to this related <em>New York Times</em> article: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/fashion/29facebook.html?_r=1&amp;ref=style">Friends, Until I Delete You.</a>

Then, today, <a href="http://www.chrisbrogan.com/">Chris Brogan</a> posted this on his blog: <a href="http://www.chrisbrogan.com/beating-dunbars-number/">Beating Dunbar's Number</a>. <strong>"Dunbar's Number" refers to a theory introduced by anthropologist Robin Dunbar, that our brains can only maintain a certain number of stable social relationships.</strong> While an exact number apparently hasn't been agreed upon, 150 is the number that's most commonly cited. (Keep in mind that the theory was presented in 1992—more than a decade before Facebook was conceived, not that Facebook alters our cognitive capacities.)

<strong>In his post, Brogan suggests that with social media platforms and the right strategies in hand, much larger social networks can be managed.</strong> One of the strategies he suggests is keeping some sort of database to keep all the details straight and easily accessible.

I can't quite imagine creating a data base to help me keep track of my community, but then again, I can't imagine having nearly 19,000 readers of my blog or over 42,000 Twitter followers, like Brogan has. I would definitely need a database to maintain a <em>slightly</em> meaningful connection with even ten percent of those people.
<h4>Do old theories, strategies and definitions still apply?</h4>
So what's the point of all this, you ask? What's the point of Dennis asking how many of my Facebook friends are actual friends, and the point of Chris Brogan looking for ways to manage some version of a community that is 100 or 200 times larger than what our brains are wired to handle?

<strong>The point, I guess, is that as a society, our understanding of "community" is changing</strong>—very significantly and rapidly for many people. Words and definitions are changing, too—we have "followers" and "fans" that we can count, and when we refer to someone as a "friend" it can mean more than one thing. To help distinguish between on-line and physical communities, people in social media circles often refer to friends IRL (in real life).

In other words, it's confusing! At least I'm confused. As I answered Dennis' question in <a href="http://www.halfwaytonormal.com/?p=256">this post</a>, about how many of my friends were actually friends, I tried desperately to work with a single definition of "friend,' whether applied to people I know in person or people I've never met.

In the same post, I responded to a related question about how social media has changed my understanding of community. I fleshed out my confusion a bit more, struggling to describe how <strong>in some ways I feel <em>more </em><em>open</em> about my true community including people I've never met in person. But in other ways I feel <em>more old-fashioned</em>.</strong>

It's not just about how many details I can keep track of about people—where they live, how many kids they have, what we've joked together about in the past. It's the nagging sense that trust and accountability are often missing on line, along with the bond that comes from eating a meal with someone, and having a live conversation.
<h4>In a fast-paced world, slower can sometimes be better</h4>
Since I brought up "old-fashioned" approaches to building community—and our current times seem to be characterized by doing everything bigger and faster—I'll leave you with the comment I left today on Chris Brogan's post:
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>This is an interesting post. In my 9 or 10 months on Twitter, I’ve found that the NUMBER of people in my network matters far less than the deliberate intention behind each individual connection.</em></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>In other words, if I have 300 people in my network, who I’ve collected rather quickly and randomly, without really knowing why each individual is unique and interesting to me, then I will probably feel overwhelmed by that number. A general sense of chaos will be attached to it.</em></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>But if I take my time, really examining new followers to figure out what they’re about, and maybe even holding off on following them back until there’s some sort of interaction or connection, they have a meaningful place in my network (and in my mind) from day one. It’s a much slower way to build a community, but I think being deliberate like that makes Dunbar’s limit pretty much irrelevant.</em></p>