Inscrutable Netizens

When it comes to your social network, the bigger is better. Or so, we are told.  The more friends and followers we have on sites like Facebook and Twitter and even Blogger, the more important you are in the online world. 

Of late, I've been thinking about the down-side of having such a big fan following in our social networking profiles.  When the numbers start to increase from a mere ten to hundreds and then to thousands, the inevitable happens. Social networking actually breaks down. 

Have a look at the case of one of my friends Meenakshi, when way back in 2005, she had a mere 12 people following her on her blog.  With her quality writing, she then built up almost a 100 followers in a short time.  There, she was enjoying the conversational nature that the medium gave her, when someone posted a comment on her blog post.  She would promptly reply back with her own take and other friends or followers joined in chipping with their own views and the conversation progressed. 

Some time in 2008, when twitter was becoming the 'next big thing', she started a new venture - Tweeting.  Mimicking a blog format, and restricted to just 140 characters, Twitter facilitated online communication while making us remember the Shakespearean thought of  'Brevity being the soul of wit'. 

Meenakshi would tweet about 'recipes' as also 'beauty tips', sandwiching occasionally with back-links to her old blog where she used to write short stories.  Her tweets soon brought in readers to both her twitter and blogger profile and her fan following soon swelled to a whooping 2000 in twitter and almost 600 plus on her blogger that too in short span of just four months.   People started ‘Like’ing and ‘Recommend’ing her posts and tweets and her all three profiles in Facebook, Twitter and Blogger were finely intertwined.  Her online world soon began to resemble like a mini cosmopolitan city with all kinds of people 'poke'ing in.  Among them, some still knew each other and indulged in meaningful discussions on the 'wall' or tweeted each other.  But, the sense of community, which existed when she had a mere 12 followers soon evaporated as people soon stopped talking to one another and eventually to her even.  Soon, it became a dead silence. At some point, the virtual society that she painfully created atomized and the connections back to her seem no longer existed.  She laments now.   

Why is this happening? Is it because social networking don't scale vertically, unlike the software released by Oracle, or Microsoft or Google? Or is it because terms like             'Orkut-Friend' or 'Facebook-Friend' take on a very different meaning from 'Friend'.  Are they like those Coffee-Table books that we buy at an enormous cost and showcase, but seldom read or browse through?

When it comes to social networking I think, the Dunbar's number in sociology has become relevant here too (Dunbar's number indicates the human social cognitive limit to the number of people we socialize with during our life time).  Generally, this number is in the range of 120 to 150.  For most people like us, who have an online profile, the number of friends (I am not talking about Facebook-Friends here) or followers whom they'd actually know and interact even with a friend like acquaintance, is only around 20-30 on a maximum.  This is way less than the Dunbar's Number range.

I feel, once a group reaches a certain size, say, about 150, each person starts feeling anonymous to the other, or the person whom they themselves is following.  From the other side of the river, the person whom they followed earlier felt like a friend, now suddenly seems larger than life and inaccessible.  Meenakshi is not alone here. The story is same with be it 'Esurient Reader' or 'Pradeep's Musings' or even ‘SRK’s Tweets'.  Beyond a certain number, the social networking just refuses to be Social.   

Apart from making the audience feel estranged, another downside to this bulging fan following is that the person after having such a huge readership often start writing and responding with caution and diplomacy, They soon start sounding almost like the politicians.  On the other hand, a twitter profile like that of Shah Rukh Khan where the fan following is three lakh and more, the followers don’t share any pretense of intimacy and everyone say whatever they want.  When the group size is around 100-150, the chats between friends do happen to an extent, they are mostly cautious of what they say.  When the number is less than 20, real intimate and true conversations happen and that is where the joy of writing and commenting really lies.  There surely is a personal connection with fewer followers, with these people listening and responding more. 

May be, Google should design applications that reward obscurity, which encourage us to remain in our shadows and lie low.  Sure, we'd be connected to fewer people, but we would be communicating WITH them, rather than talking TO them.  But why would big computer corporations do that? After all, their revenue comes from advertising pointed to users from whom information is in turn collected. So more people means more information and obviously, more money.