More primatology
March 9, 2009
The folks at 850 KOA, a Colorado news-radio channel, called me up this morning to chat more about friendship and human group size in the age of Facebook. Here is our conversation.
(If you’re just arriving, this is about a piece I wrote in The Economist called Primates on Facebook. I blogged about the back story here.)
Update: Cameron Marlow, whom I described as Facebook’s “in-house sociologist”, has now posted his back story with lots, lots more data and detail and analysis.
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Dude. You snuck in the s-word and implied that we’re related to primates – on a station owned by Clear Channel, Inc. Strong work. You can’t buy that kind of time.
Oh well. And I didn’t even know what stage I was on.
On the downside, my wife tells me I was long-winded and didn’t get to the point soon enough. Which is true. I had just woken up and was a different sort of primate.
Fortuitously, I happened upon a passage in just this past hour, in the novel “Revolutionary Road”, which I think applies to Facebook.
One of the characters says to another over lunch: “……..everything is selling. Nothing happens in this world, nothing comes into this world, until somebody makes a sale……..where the hell do you think you’d be if your father hadn’t sold your mother a bill of goods?”
The dynamics of Facebook become clearer if we see it through the prism of selling – selling oneself.