One of the most interesting ideas in this unit's lectures was Dunbar's number, a concept I've seen floated before using other words. If you don't remember what I'm talking about, it's the idea that people can only maintain about 150 meaningful relationships at a time. Where I've seen it before was in an old article from the humor website Cracked, where the author proposed the concept independent of any academic knowledge and dubbed it the monkeysphere, since it's a holdover from early human evolution. It's really cool to see that this idea, which I found very insightful, actually has some scientific basis.
The humor article in question wasn't about social media exactly, it was more about the problem of online harassment. Back then it was mostly an issue in the comment sections of articles, but constant social media usage has really pushed it to the forefront in recent years. I don't mean that in the 'cancel culture' way you hear from politicians. People talking back to those in power is a perfectly normal political process. I mean harassment of ordinary people who don't have power. The original article I read introduced the 'monkeysphere' aka Dunbar's number to explain why so many people feel comfortable being awful to strangers online. In short, their brains are out of room for new people and make it hard to see some random online stranger as a full human.
I have a lot of experience with online harassment, mostly in fandom contexts, and definitely true that the people who participate in it don't see their targets as human beings. There's a very strong level of dehumanization required to do some of the awful stuff I've seen and most of them have no trouble expressing it in explicit terms. They will say the words "you're not human" and show all signs that they fully believe it. So while Dunbar's number only applies to meaningful relationships rather than larger questions of worldview, I think there's probably a logical extension of the theory that deals with seeing the humanity of others as well. It could be a larger number than 150 or something more complicated that includes stuff like in-group out-group dynamics, but I agree that the human brain most likely has a hard limit to the number of people it can understand at once. At some point, we just stop thinking of others as fully human. Most of the time that's really not too important, but it can definitely get dangerous.
I know I read somewhere that the human brain actually can’t conceptualize numbers when they get too big. A million seconds is about 12 days, but a billion seconds is about 31 years. That sort of disparity is hard to grasp. There’s more than 7 billion people alive today. With the internet, people are able to communicate with unprecedented amounts of people. I don’t think it’s possible for the human brain to comprehend just how many people there are, and how each person is, in fact, an actual individual. Add in barriers keeping them psychically separate, like communicating through the internet, and that’s going to make it harder to fully comprehend.
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