An evolutionary anthropology professor, Robin Dunbar still stands by his ‘Dunbar number’ of 150 , which signifies the maximum number of friends one can have in a lifetime at any given time. Dunbar has now expanded his research to include online social networking arena.
He observed and studied social networking sites, such as, Facebook, Bebo, Myspace to analyse patterns for his research. He looked at patterns of communication and interaction on these networks. “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,” he told The Sunday Times.
All this, according to Dunbar, is down to one part of our brain that deals with language and personal interaction. This signifies that even though our virtual friend circle is increasing by the day, we simply do not have the capacity to manage a network of more than 150 friends at max. Well, that’s a bit of a setback for those who boast of managing a Twitter follower list of thousands! Or is it?