Recently in my limited spare time I was introduced to the concept of the “Monkeysphere”, a term coined by David Wong of Cracked.com to describe the practical application of Dunbar’s Number. Dunbar is a Primatologist (a branch of science that deals with the cross of anthropology and evolutionary biology) who recognized the link between the brain size of non-human primates and the size of their social groups. Dunbar examined the brains and social structures of thirty-eight different species of monkeys around the world. Dunbar’s regression of the data established the theoretical maximum social network for a human to be 148 individuals (with the 95% reliability range of 100 to 210). This number is often cited as 150, and it is a revolutionary concept that is rippling through all of modern sociology.
More below the fold…
Dunbar’s number was first published in a 1992 article (Dunbar, R.I.M. (1992) Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates, Journal of Human Evolution 22: 469-493.). Since then further study on actual human social networks have affirmed the postulate (even if they disagree on the exact number, the findings agree on magnitude). Current research dealing with Dunbar’s number focuses on social networking software and how to break our physiological barriers against larger social networks.
So what is the Monkeysphere? To paraphrase Wong, at a certain point other people just become a faceless mob and you really don’t care if one of them dies. The Monkeysphere is everyone who you would actually care about. The people who exist in your mind in a multi-dimensional way have an intrinsic value to your life as a whole make up your Monkeysphere. These are the people who you “shed tears” for when they die. Every person in your Monkeysphere is an actual person; those outside of it are the asshole that cut you off in traffic, the thing that stocks your grocery store, or in Wong’s example: the thing that takes your garbage away.
When considering the larger applications of Dunbar’s Number, two things must be taken into consideration: 1) Dunbar’s Number accounts for social groups that are dependent upon each other for survival, and 2) the practical striation of your social network make support a larger number, but the degree of concern given to the extent of that group does not meet Dunbar’s criteria.
Our first consideration, mortal urgency, dictates that the groupings not critical for survival will have smaller thresholds for instability. This has manifested itself in the most particular of ways: guild membership in MMORPGS while given much higher limits, find a stability limit at sixty members. Anyone who has been with a major guild long enough has seen the cycle of engorgement and purging that takes place. Read more about that here thanks to Christopher Allen at Life With Alacrity.
The second consideration, social depth, is something that the software networkers are trying to wrap their code around and forums are hoping to leverage to build their communities. Most of you reading this can relate to not having a deeper human connection to the person with whom you are conversing across the vastness of cyberspace. Maybe you have dozens of people reading posts on the forum you contribute to, but how many of these people actually realize you are a living breathing human being? That is the hurdle that Dunbar’s Number presents, and this is what the developers are desperately trying to overcome.
So thus ends the introduction to the Monkeysphere, a topic of which I have only begun to scratch the surface.
