Business - Written Thursday, June 18, 2009 by Denis Hancock - 3 Comments

Dunbar, Gladwell, Collaboration and Twitter

A couple of days ago Naumi had an excellent post on the diminishing returns of collaboration. He highlighted two areas where problems typically emerge – at an individual level (one person can only do so much) and at a project level (only so many people can do one thing). Included in the discussion was the mention of Dunbar’s number, which sets “a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships” at 150. In terms of collaborative overhead, Dunbar speculates that “as much as 42% of the group’s time would have to be devoted to social grooming.”

As I was reading the post, it got me thinking about twitter (as has been happening a lot lately) – and the implications that it might have on various collaborative efforts within society. Many, many people scale their Twitter network well beyond the 150 person threshold, and many of them seem to be extremely active. This would seem to cause potential  problems at both the individual level (the brain getting distracted and the quality of the output suffering) and at the project level (if too many people in a network are responding to an ‘idea’, it could easily become a mess of distracting noise). One area we believe that this is playing out a bit is in relation to comments on blogs. Hypothesis: the quantity and quality of comments on blogs are dropping because of the time being allocated to tweeting and other such activities. The jury is out on whether this a good or bad thing.

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