Are the principles of social networks faltering?
Social networks are an excellent platform for establishing different types of relationships: finding family, friends of childhood, people with common interests, professional relationships, etc.
What’s more, it usually gives us a lot of envy when we see on facebook, twitter or linkedin people or companies that are followed by a lot of fans, followers, etc. But does having many followers is good, bad or otherwise?
As in most of the questions: it depends. It depends on what we expect from those relationships or those followers.
Dave Morin, who worked on Facebook for four years before being the co-founder of the social network Path, stated that facebook had made it possible for socialization on the internet to be normal and possible, But that now we had the possibility to re-“personalize” that socialization.
To do this, Morin called Robin Dunbar, a professor at Oxford University, to learn more about his research and his theory. Dunbar told him that social networks resemble a set of concentric circles: 150 people constitute the outer limit of friends, 50 is the limit for trusted friends, 15 for good friends, and 5 for best friends. Dunbar studies are based on the volume of cerebral neocortex and are now used in areas as diverse as anthropology, sociology, statistics, business administration and recently for social networks.
“What does Dunbar’s research represent? Because no matter how technology advances,
