In all the topics posted so far, we have seen how social networks have changed the way people communicate, opened bigger perspectives for marketing and businesses and raised new questions on whether with new advancements the Internet is still a safe place for the commonplace user.
Social networking comes with a lot of gifts and a lot of risks. Every user keeps trying to maximize the former and minimize the latter as much as possible.
Apart from all that, many old theories in social networking are being questioned today. One that particularly interested me is the concept of Dunbar’s number. The notion says that the maximum number of people that a person can maintain stable social relationships with is 150.
This is indeed quite contradictory to the number of friends some people have on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn today. Perhaps it would be more right to just analyze how “reachable” one person is to another.
A related metric is the “degrees of separation” between two people. Facebook and LinkedIn actually use this exact metric to map people in cyberspace.
Since this search space is almost as real as actual society at times, recruiters can find potential employees on Facebook and scour over their digital footprints that they may leave on blogs or websites to get a glimpse of their personality and let these parameters influence their hiring decisions at times.
Social networks today are an expanding universe with the uniqueness that the distances within are fast shrinking. Let’s stay connected and stay safe.
