Mike Arauz's Blog – The Archives

Last week a couple of us Undercurrent folks gave a talk on web video. As we were discussing the basic idea that the internet has led to fragmented communities formed around niche interests, we got a great question that's stuck with me since the talk: Is there a limit to the number of niche communities one person can be a part of?

I believe that there is a limit, but, like the limit on the size of our social network, the internet has significantly increased the limit on our ability to be part of multiple interest communities (organized groups who's activities are motivated by a shared interest in a specific subject).

I've heard a lot of talk recently about the expanding limits of an individual's social network. The British anthropologist, Robin Dunbar theorized that—in a pre-internet world—an individual was capable of sustaining roughly 150 human relationships, aka the eponymous Dunbar number. Since the internet has taken on a central role in establishing and maintaining relationships, this theoretical limit on our social lives has grown. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this number may easily be two or even three times as large for participants of the social web (counting meaningful relationships fostered with Facebook friends, Twitter followers, and blog readers). The "ambient intimacy" enabled by emerging means of digital communication, as described in Clive Thompson's great article in the NYTimes magazine last month, has fundamentally altered the effort vs. results equation of relationship building.

So, what about the new limits of an individual's participation in multiple interest communities?

As was the case with personal relationships, prior to the internet participation in interest communities was limited by time, space, and the costs of communication. Groups of people had to be available to meet at the same time, they had to live near enough to each other to meet occasionally in person, and communications through newsletters or other one-to-many channels had direct publishing or broadcasting costs. The internet has destroyed those obstacles.

Our ability to be part of multiple interest communities has broadened compared to what was possible before the internet. Yet, we are still limited to some extent by human nature, by our mind, and our ability to care and to pay attention.

When we consider how our ability to be part of multiple communities has evolved, the difference is in connection, not participation. Our ability to actively participate in a chosen interest community has only increased slightly; most people are still only active in a small number of groups. Our ability to simply connect with a chosen interest community, however, has increased tremendously. Through blogs, message boards, email lists, social network site groups, and conversation platforms like Twitter, it is exponentially easier to intimately observe the activities of a group while not necessarily actively participating yourself; and by continually listening over time, you can reasonably feel like you are part of that community.

It is this long-tale of groups that we feel part of by merely observing, with only minimal participation through commenting on an occasional blog post or sharing a link with our own social network, that significantly increases the number of potential interest communities we can claim to be a part of.

This is what the landscape looks like now: huge communities are bonding over seemingly obscure shared interests because the cost of connecting is approaching zero. And as Clay Shirky discusses in Here Comes Everybody, under the right circumstances, these communities can be mobilized to achieve tremendous outcomes. We see this dynamic at work in politics (Obama was a fringe candidate when he declared his candidacy), popular entertainment (comic book heroes used to just be for comic book geeks), and commerce (Apple was quaint before it was a cult).

What do you think? How many communities would you say you are a part of? And what makes it possible?