Thursday, March 24, 2011

Dunbar's Number

The other day,while I was browsing the internet, I stumbled upon this article by The Onion:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/deaths-of-20000-japanese-afford-planet-solid-15-mi,19785/

As cynical as this article is, it does illustrate a particular aspect of human psychology. Specifically how the farther removed a person is from another person in terms of personal relationships, the less they each have the ability to feel empathy for each other. This phenomenon is known as Dunbar's number,  which states that the maximum amount of personal relationships a human being can maintain is around 150. The concept is named for Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist who first theorized the concept. A humorous explanation of the concept can be found here:

http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere_p2.html

As David Wong in the Cracked article points out, Dunbar's number causes us to see other humans removed from our social groups in a "us vs them" perspective. It causes us to view different nationalities and subcultures as as identical masses of people with no individual personalities. It's almost psychologically impossible to view that one asshole who cuts us off as a human being with the same feeling as us.

Keeping Dunbar's number in mind can help us avoid grouping people into a bland category. Humans are unimaginably complex and we should remember that each individual human has gone through countless life experience which have shaped their way of thinking and have resulted in each human having a vastly different perspective than another person. Even if two people seem to have a lot in common, they may have very different opinions under the surface.

With all this in mind, it becomes easier to resist simplistic "us vs them" or "good vs evil" arguments. Countless people have been able to manipulate other people because they realize this particular facet of human psychology. Remember, the world is an unimaginably complex place and no problem is ever mono-causal.

Friday, March 18, 2011

Future of Newspapers

As we are all well aware, newspapers have been declining in circulation for years and their demise seems imminent. Most people seem to not view this as a big deal, as we now tend to get all of our news from either TV or the internet. We figure that if newspapers stop putting out print editions, then they'll probably just switch to an all-online format. However, this raises the question if any of the major newspapers will be able to operate entirely online.

Currently, nearly all newspapers have free online editions. Some newspapers require a subscription to access some online content but those are few and far between. If print circulation of newspapers continues to decline, I see it as inevitable that all the major newspapers will eventually require subscriptions to view their online content. And also inevitably, this will raise protests from the online community.

People will say that newspapers should just increase their online advertising rather than require subscriptions. The problem with increasing advertising is that it raises conflict of interest issues, since more and more newspapers will be reluctant to launch investigations of major companies who could also be potential advertisers. Not to mention that increased online advertising will likely be distracting. And may not even help all that much since a lot of people tend to have ad blocker installed on their browsers.

People will also declare that they'll get their news from other sources such as cable TV or blogs. First off, I can't be the only person who prefers to read the news rather than just watch. I usually check Google News every day for stories and I'll only put on CNN for background noise. There's also the fact that the entire purpose of cable news is to be sensationalistic in order to attract ratings. Cable TV generally only broadcasts stories which will attract the most rating while important, but seemingly boring stories get pushed into horrible timeslots. I prefer to be able to search online for stories which interest me and get more in-depth analysis, while cable TV will generally shorten stories to soundbites.

Meanwhile, the problem with blogs is that they usually don't have the resources for investigative journalism or even actual reporting. Usually, they're just reposts of stories from major newspapers. And they tend to be politically biased and I like my news sources to at least try to maintain neutrality.

So, if newspapers decide to make their online editions subscription-based, it'll be interesting to see how it'll affect where people get their news. Maybe they'll just accept it and shell out money for the subscription. Or maybe they'll just switch to blogs and cable TV. Hell, news stories may even become pirated in a way similar to how movie, music and TV shows are pirated over the internet. Whole sites could spring up dedicated to sharing free news stories from major newspapers, creating a whole new issue in copyright law. All in all, the affect it'll have on the public being well-informed will be enormous.

Friday, March 4, 2011

Effortless Friendship

If one thing can be said about Facebook, it's that it has made staying in contact with people infinitely easier. By merely sending a friend request one, through a news feed, can receive constant updates as to what is going on in a person's life. A person can literally spend months without having even a single IM chat with a person but still know everything that happened in those months.

It used to be that staying in touch with people actually required effort. If someone moved away, you would have to call them regularly and write often in order to find out what has happened in their lives. If you wanted to see people from your old high school you lost touch with you would have to go to a high school reunion. Now all you have to do is friend the people you want to stay in touch with, no need for a reunion. To learn about a person's interests, you had to engage them in lengthy conversation. Now, a quick glance at a person's Facebook page usually lets you get the gist of a person.

With all this in mind, it raises the question of what Facebook does to the value of friendship. Because staying in touch with people is now so effortless, does it cause us to view friendship more casually? Or since we can now so easily learn what a person is like, does it cause us to appreciate people more?

Either way, it'll be interesting to see how Facebook continues to affect human relationships. Assuming Facebook is still around then, we could friend a person now and still be Facebook friends with a person sixty years from now. You could watch sixty years of a person's life in the form of Facebook statuses while barely talking to them. I could almost see funerals in the future having a ritual where the most important Facebook statuses of their lives are read aloud.