Grooming Primates on Facebook.

I have been neglecting this blog again while I facebook, twitter, read other blogs, read books and generally lead a normal life. It's amazing the number of social networking sites and tools that have developed now, to eat into our time. Most of us utilise some or all of them (as in my case).

Why do we use them?

Out of the 201 odd "friends" on my list, 15-20 of them are actual friends or family members that matter. They know my number or email id and really do not need a social networking site to keep in touch. In fact, some of my close friends have boycotted facebook and stuck to the old fashioned email/phone. They find the entire social networking scene extremely intrusive in their private life. They do not wish to see other peoples' holiday photographs with pets, housekeeper and child in tow. They do not wish to broadcast their life to all and sundry on their 200 odd list. They do not wish to receive a status update when some one farts.

When I skim through my facebook there are many people who I barely know or do not wish to know. People who now can see the comings and goings of my life thanks to access to my private wall conversations etc. Its the same with twitter and to a certain extent with blogs as well although I feel I have more control over these two, I cannot control what photos I am tagged in or what people say on my wall. I can delete posts or tags but that would be bad facebook etiquette, or would it?

The entire process of social networking according to the Economist magazine is an exercise in primate grooming. Have a read of the bits that I thought were quite interesting or click on the link for the entire article.

From the Economist Article :


THAT Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks will increase the size of human social groups is an obvious hypothesis, given that they reduce a lot of the friction and cost involved in keeping in touch with other people. Once you join and gather your “friends” online, you can share in their lives as recorded by photographs, “status updates” and other titbits, and, with your permission, they can share in yours. Additional friends are free, so why not say the more the merrier

But perhaps additional friends are not free. Primatologists call at least some of the things that happen on social networks “grooming”. In the wild, grooming is time-consuming and here computerisation certainly helps. But keeping track of who to groom—and why—demands quite a bit of mental computation. You need to remember who is allied with, hostile to, or lusts after whom, and act accordingly. Several years ago, therefore, Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148. Rounded to 150, this has become famous as “the Dunbar number”.

What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more “active” or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group.

Thus an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.

What mainly goes up, therefore, is not the core network but the number of casual contacts that people track more passively. This corroborates Dr Marsden’s ideas about core networks, since even those Facebook users with the most friends communicate only with a relatively small number of them.

Put differently, people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a polling organisation. Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.

After quite a bit of social networking I have to agree with this article, my list of friends is a farce. I have 15, maybe 20, people on my list that really matter. I have at times updated my status with useless junk. I enjoy catching up with friends' lives but I can do that through email with more privacy and with my close friends and family that is what I do. So facebook is just filled with primates broadcasting their lives to their second tier friends, and I get a large number of these useless broadcasts. So why do I continue...I guess I'm still grooming eh?