vexikron, 1 year ago (edited 11 months ago)

So, Dunbar’s number comes into play here.

Super summarized, in 1993 an anthropologist (guess his last name), made a compelling argument that the average person cannot maintain more than about 150 meaningful relationships.

This idea has since been generally embraced by many scientists, and to my knowledge, the basic concept has been reaffirmed many times.

A more recent study in 2021 criticizes Dunbar’s original methodology, but functionally reinforces the main concept, just concluding that via a more comprehensive statistical analysis along the lines of Dunbar’s methodology, the 95% confidence interval is basically between 3 and 520 people.

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/…/rsbl.2021.0158

Anyway, yeah, the phenomenon of celebrity fame, and more recently parasocial relationships very clearly show that many, many people are seriously changed and challenged by being surrounded by, and interacting with a functionally endless number of fans, who are also critics.

The internet is, at this point, replete with people who turn into extremely shitty people, develop mental disorders, in some cases kill themselves, etc, because of the way that having a large ‘following’ warps your mind.

But, fast forward almost 15 years after Malcolm Gladwell largely popularized the concept of Dunbar’s number amongst academics, intellectuals, Social Media went from a curious internet phenomenon seeming like it might be neat, might be a fad…

…To basically warping the fabric of reality itself via cutthroat and extremely exploitative business decisions causing more or less the ‘norm’ nowadays to be constantly flooded with content and constantly pressured to post content.

Especially in America, but obviously also in many other regions… many, many people suffer serious mental health problems from using popular social media apps, but it has become the norm… because they have been intentionally designed to be addictive.

To conclude: go touch grass basically, but maybe also try to remember the before time, and just uninstall apps that control you and make you mentally unstable.