Online social networking platforms allow people to develop social networks with ties to thousands, and in some cases millions, of others. When a personal network grow beyond a certain size the relationships seem to lose their intimacy and the sense of community is suffering.

The social brain

The reason for this may be that there is a limit to how many social relationships the human brain is capable of processing and synthesizing information on, referred to as The social brain hypothesis. Research has found that all humans, independent of culture, have a hierarchy of social groups with fixed sizes that are likely to have been the same since prehistoric times (source: Discrete hierarchical organization of social group sizes).

Social group sizes

The support clique is made up of the tree to five people closest to us we, who we would seek personal advice or help from in times of serious distress.

Beyond the support clique is the sympathy group of twelve to twenty people we have special ties to and keep in touch with regularly.

The next level are bands of thirty to fifty individuals, the same size as overnight hunting and gathering groups. These bands change in composition but are all pulled from the same larger group.

The clan is a larger group of about 150 individuals. This is also called Dunbar’s number, after the scientist who found that this is the maximum number of people with whom a stable personal relationships can be maintained. This is the same size as traditional small societies.

There has also been found evidence for at least two larger groups, a megaband of about 500 people and the tribe of about 1000-2000 individuals.

What are the consequences for online social network platforms?

So what are the consequences of these findings for online social networking platforms? How can they be redesigned to better support traditional social group sizes?

The problem with generic social networks like Facebook and Twitter is that people do not have generic identities. Our identities are many faceted and complex which is part of what makes people so wonderfully and intriguingly unique. We play different roles in different contexts, and when those contexts merge our worlds collide and things get ugly, or at least annoyingly complex to juggle. Consider when your parents join Facebook or your boss asks to be your Facebook friend.

In the offline world there is no such thing as a generic social network. All our social networks are niche social networks where we get to nurture parts of our complex identities and fulfill some of our many social needs.

This is why I believe that our current concern with generic online social networks like Facebook and Twitter will eventually pass as we all re-discover our various identities in online niche social networks. People may still want to have a presence in the generic social networks, but the majority of user-created content, self expression, and activity will be distributed across our various niche social networks.

Social media can safely be called one of the biggest trends of 2009. By now  it has become more popular than email and everyone’s grandma is doing it.

Even if the social media concept is new to many it is closely related to other concepts which have been studied for decades and can teach us a lot.

Social media has inherited aspects from social networks, computer-mediated communication, and human-computer interaction. It is also related to domains like computer supported collaboration, online communities, online identity,  impression management, interpersonal relationship, interpersonal communication, and group communication. Knowledge gathered in these domains over the years help us understand the social media phenomena.