Is Facebook Primal or Paleo?

Posted on June 20, 2012 By Jim Paleo Blog Updates

Richard Nikolay writing at Free The Animal.com has ”gone primal” on Facebook. By that I mean that he’s going to keep his

“friends” limited to his immediate tribe of intimate friends and close family. Looking at the issue of “is Facebook Primal or Paleo” from the point of view of what constitutes a real and meaningful relationship>

I have seen estimates that humans really can only manage meaningful relationships with about 80 people, others has estimated it as high as around 300.

Is Facebook Primal or Paleo?

My Hunter-Gatherer Social Experiment With Facebook

I’ve long written on this blog along these lines: we evolved to account for the values and actions of about 30 other individuals. The corollary: at that level, each individual has a real potential to influence the collective action of the entire group, should it be important enough to undertake.

And the general social corollary is that this does not scale to 230 Facebook friends, a half million citizens in your “tight knit” community, 300 million Americans…or, what, 7 billion Earth inhabitants? …Hunter-gatherers might not scoff outright at the idea of voting, per se. But I’m pretty sure they’d scoff at it being secret and anonymous (no personal accountability), but then they’re bound to it.

…I had pretty much come to hate Facebook. Many do anyway, but usually for different reasons than I. That runs the gamut from the envy over Zuckerberg’s smashing billionaire success—to now gloating over the not-so-pretty public stock offering—to the constant hand wringing over privacy

issues (that’s the price you pay if you want free), to silly butthurt complaints about how their free service is configured, and the changes they make

when they want to make them.

Read the whole article here…