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Quotes like, “technology changes, humans don’t” and “human nature doesn’t change, human behavior does” are quite popular these days, especially if you’re talking to someone in the interactive space.
But, what does it mean in terms of how people continue to connect? According to Mark Zuckerberg’s interview on the Today Show, Facebook is growing by 700,000 users a day. Holy cow! Thirteen hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. Woah! An average of 42 tweets are sent every second. Yowza! Those are some impressive numbers. Clearly, not only are we consuming information these days, but people are also more comfortable producing AND publicly publishing their creations and feelings (90% of Twitter accounts are not locked).
But, are we really mass communicating? Do we have more “real” friends? Have our circles grown? Or, do we continue to interact in niches?
While the way we communicate has changed (human behavior), our nature has not. Dunbar’s Number, what I call the 150 theory, still weighs heavily on us. While Facebook users average between 120 – 500 “friends”, they only interact intimately with an average of 24, or 5-10% of friends. If you remove the outliers (i.e. @chrisbrogan) and Corporations (i.e. @jetblue), the average number people follow on twitter is 150. Seems similar to the average number of “friends” people have on Facebook. While you may follow 150 people , how many of those do you @ reply or DM? I bet that stat is similar to the Facebook one – intimate interaction whittles down to only 5% of your network.
You can’t change a leopard’s spots. Can you change human nature? Will humans ever intimately interact with more than 5-10% of their network? Personally, I don’t think so. But, only time will tell.
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