In discussing Dunbar’s Number and urban tribes, I’m looking for fundamental scales of human organization. Ryley pointed me to two quite similar hierarchies:

The military grouping is often said to be consistent throughout history, although with support units it’s hard to be sure apples are compared to apples. I think the numbers have been tending downward in the last 100 years due to area-effect weapons and mobilization (you can control less troops when they’re moving around really fast and you don’t want to keep them too close together). This guy claims that you need 6 people to maintain sentries, which might have something to do with why teams are almost always deployed at least in pairs (eg: one of my favourite video games, Full Spectrum Warrior).

“Support cliques” and “sympathy groups” are so named by Dunbar because of specific ways of measuring them: your support clique is your first line of support in really tough times and your sympathy group is the people who’d be devastated if you died. This table makes it clear that the phrase “urban tribes” was coined by Ethan Watters without much background reading. Watters is talking about post-kinship, post-economic families and needed a snappy name.

Anthropologists are convinced that these group sizes are based on human cognitive limits. I’m not sure I’m ready to give up my dedication to 8ish as a common human grouping (for example, as the maximum size for an ad-hoc meeting) given that 7±2 is the most famous human cognitive limit.

Caitlin recently brought to my attention that factory farms in Mexico are being scapegoated for swine flu. Factory farms do have characteristics that may increase the risk of developing zoonotic pandemics. But getting rid of factory farms is not a panacea.

In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond (no relation) makes this argument:

• Eurasian animals, especially horses, are better for domestication than animals in the rest of the world
• living closely with so many domesticated animals caused Eurasians to develop resistance to many diseases that remained endemic in the population
• when Eurasians showed up in America, the diseases were spread to natives with no resistance

Humans will continue to get zoonotic diseases just by having domesticated animals around. For example, SARS was caused either by semidomesticated civet cats or wild bats. And no one has called for closing of petting zoos, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they have less pigs this summer…

The most common complaint about Facebook made by people who have never been on Facebook is that it takes too much time. After joining, they quickly realize that their friends are not actually generating that much interesting activity (the days of death by 1000 SuperWall pokes are long over). Most of what your friends do is just broadcasting and interactions are generally small and quick. It’s not for nothing that anthropologists call these social interactions “grooming”.

The most common complaint about Facebook made by people who have suspended their accounts is that it doesn’t significantly contribute to their social life. These people fail to understand that the little actions of monitoring their friends’ broadcasts (done before social networking with gossip) and engaging in grooming add up to social cohesion. But what about all the broadcasts you don’t care about in the least and all the friends you never interact with? The problem, in my opinion, is that you aren’t friends with the right people on Facebook.

If you’re a promoter or political organizer or something like that, then your professional Facebook profile should collect as many friends as possible. If you’re a regular citizen, then I think the proper use of Facebook is to do high-quality grooming of a smaller number of people. I propose setting a fixed number of friends and unfriending someone every time you go over that number. This has to be a fuzzy process for a few reasons:

• not everyone you socially interact with is currently on Facebook (eg: your boss, your grandmother)
• after you lose touch with people you hang on to them for awhile online to reduce friction in restarting the relationship
• when you first meet someone you friend them as part of the process of building a social relationship, a process that might fail

I’m going to use Dunbar’s Number: 150. There are many reasons why this number is arbitrary, but there’s some precedent and it is a good symbol. I hit 151 friends today and unfriended someone I met only once many months ago. If you’re with me, join this group.

The argument has been made in Victoria that there are synergies when social services are clustered together that outweight the ghettoization of a neighbourhood. This argument could also be applied to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The Tyee recently ran a different, rather surprising argument:

The majority of Downtown Eastside residents have life situations that are similar to each other and different from the situations of the residents of any other neighbourhood. This congregation of difference creates a unique culture.* In particular, the culture is more community-oriented. Gentrification of the neighbourhood will destroy this unique culture.

* Testing whether this is true for language, (street) art and cultural rituals is an entire anthropology research program.