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Dunbar's Number

My personal strategy for anonimity on the Web is to game the system by joining every social site I discover, liking everything, friending everybody (whom I actually know and who want to be friends, ok almost everybody), and posting the same benign profile stuff everywhere. Why you ask? To confound those spooky behavorial targeting algorithms that lurk in the backgroud of the Web as best I can. I see it as a challenge; to not be profile-able.

Because of this strategy, I have long since passed the so-called "Dunbar Number" on many social sites to which I belong. It's also caused me to follow closely the work of people like John Udell and projects like Open Social. The Dunbar Number is a hypothesis about social group size limits by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar. A good summary of the hypothesis can be found on The Psychology Wiki and in this blog entry by Chris Allen.

What made me think of this in the first place was a podcast interview of Spencer Wells by NPR's Dr. Moira Gunn.


Spencer Wells is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society and
Frank H. T. Rhodes Class of '56 Professor at Cornell University. He leads the
Genographic Project, which is collecting and analyzing hundreds of thousands of
DNA samples from people around the world in order to decipher how our ancestors
populated the planet. Wells received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and
conducted postdoctoral work at Stanford and Oxford.

They were discussing his new book Pandora's Seed. I loved Well's Genographic Project (I contributed my own DNA for it) and I was considering reading his new book until I heard Wells discuss it. It seems to me that he threw the kitchen sink (e.g. global warming, obesity, etc.) into this book to hit as many liberal agenda hot buttons (and sell as many books) as he could. One example of the things that particularly annoyed me in the interview was that Wells seemed to take some credit for pointing out the relationship between the typical Facebook Friend list size (which is apparently about 150 "friends" on average) and Dunbar's Number of people in a neolithic farming village (also about 150). I think I'll pass on the new book.

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