Do online social media cut through the constraints that limit the size of offline social networks?

By Robin I. M. Dunbar. Royal Society Open Science, 2016

337 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The social brain hypothesis has suggested that natural social network sizes may have a characteristic size in humans. This is determined in part by cognitive constraints and in part by the time costs of servicing relationships. Online social networking offers the potential to break through the glass ceiling imposed by at least the second of these, potentially enabling us to maintain much larger social networks. This is tested using two separate UK surveys, each randomly stratified by age, gender and regional population size. The data show that the size and range of online egocentric social networks, indexed as the number of Facebook friends, is similar to that of offline face-to-face networks. For one sample, respondents also specified the number of individuals in the inner layers of their network (formally identified as support clique and sympathy group), and these were also similar in size to those observed in offline networks. This suggests that, as originally proposed by the social brain hypothesis, there is a cognitive constraint on the size of social networks that even the communication advantages of online media are unable to overcome. In practical terms, it may reflect the fact that real (as opposed to casual) relationships require at least occasional face-to-face interaction to maintain them.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dd2ee054b1a49df8964caf25b5e12648acc2f616

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Citations in the corpus

Synchrony as an Adaptive Mechanism for Large-Scale Human Social Bonding (2016, neutral): “…a wide variety of interpersonal situations, including hunter-gatherer clans (Dunbar 1993), Christmas card networks (Hill & Dunbar 2003), and active Facebook relationships (Arnaboldi et al. 2013; Dunbar et al. 2015; Dunbar 2016), yet we can also experience a sense of connection with larger groups.”
The “online brain”: how the Internet may be changing our cognition (2019, background): “…interventions, while addressing key (but frequently neglected) targets such as social connected ness, social support and selfefficacy, to aim to bring about sustained functional improvements in severe and complex 119 processing, sentiment analyses and machine learning, could be capitalized…”
The effects of social deprivation on adolescent development and mental health (2020, positive): “Digitally mediated interactions challenge our traditional conceptualisations of what so-cialising entails( 64 ) as they can be asynchronous, one-to-many, click-based or audio-video-reliant.”