I think language v. grooming is the thing that distinguishes us most from other apes—and the thing that makes it easiest to understand our primate ancestry
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been thinking a lot about how i’m literally an ape
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While it's impressive to understand how effective we are at creating large social graphs, it's important to remember that human communities are a means to an end: longevity, health, and well-being
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The volume/quality of your social relationships is predictive of a wide range of physiological and mental health outcomes—isolation is a sickness in the literal sense
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isolation is a disease and an epidemic
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A lot more to talk about here, but I'll end the thread with this very real graph from Dunbar's 'Anatomy of Friendship' (2017), my favorite academic paper of all time
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Modern humans have stacked an array of distribution technologies on top of language (printing press, video recording, social media, etc.) which have allowed us to dramatically amplify our social bandwidth
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Enter language:
"Not only can speech be combined with almost every other activity, but it can also be used to address several different individuals simultaneously."
Compared to physical grooming, language is *insanely* scalable and efficient as a vector for social bonding
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These technologies—especially social media—enable us to communicate asynchronously, and with a far greater number of people
It's easy to imagine that these help us maintain larger and denser social graphs than the ~150 postulated by Dunbar
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I tried to guesstimate this once and, even if you excluded asymmetric parasocial relationships, got to about 800 folks who were close enough to invite over to dinner with my family.
It is interesting how both tech and "broader shape of world" enables (and hinders) this. twitter.com/fortelabs/stat…
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While social media has certainly introduced novel social (and political) dynamics, Dunbar concludes that they don't fundamentally improve our ability to form and sustain close friendships
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rs
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This is because our online friendships still demand our limited time and cognitive/emotional energy
Anyone can have thousands of Twitter mutuals or FB friends, but social media can't increase our daily allocation of emotional capital
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if you play the game right you can provide a venue for your twitter mutuals or FB friends to take care of each other
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a lot of people on earnest twitter seem to be outliers wrt natural network size and emotional stamina, and there seems to be a sort of hyperconnector friendship-optimization meta game going on here
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