Glen, FWIW, the evolutionary psychological take on this is that we are designed to live in groiups of 40 to 60 or so. But human beings, in their more recent evolutionary history, last milllion years or so, have been forced into larger associations. But, as MacLuhan (?) pointed out, this has been accomplished by granting to total strangers the same sorts of trust that we properly grant to our village mates, creating situations in which poor rural southerners defended slave owning with their lives and the trailer-living tea-baggers defend the rights of the rich to make unreasonable amounts of money . The concept of celebrity is just this confusion between village and mass culture. The next step is to make everybody a celebrity, and that, of course, is what facebook is about. Whoopee! We can all have the experience of having strangers think they know us.
Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([email protected]) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] > [Original Message] > From: glen e. p. ropella <[email protected]> > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> > Date: 11/24/2009 7:31:04 AM > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions > > > >From the wikipedia article: "Thus, the 150-member group would occur only > because of absolute necessity i.e., due to intense environmental and > economic pressures." > > So, if we run with this speculation, we could further speculate that: > > 1) those of us with the smallest tribes are the most well off (i.e. not > under intense pressures) or insulated, and > > 2) hyper-connected cultural trends like those involving facebook and > twitter and perhaps even the group identification surrounding > "superstars", highly popular novels, movies, clothing, etc. are all a > response to some as yet unidentified survival pressure. > > If you put (1) and (2) together, you can infer that those of us with > small tribes will soon be catastrophically eliminated by this as yet > unidentified pressure because we're insulated from and can't intuitively > sense the eminent survival pressure. > > Hence, the message is: > > Join Facebook or DIE! > > ;-) > > > -- > glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
