Attention seeking, scale and personhood

With each day that I spend less (translated to "almost none at all" time on Facebook, I feel better). My attention is more focused, I am more able to interact with family members, read books, write, call people on the phone, etc.

My mind returns to the essential wisdom of the Dunbar Number, anthropologist Robin Dunbar's observation that human beings can maintain stable relationships with a maximum of 150 people, and that within that there is further narrowing, such that one can have only a few really close friends. Which makes sense. To have good and deep relationships you have to see and talk to people a lot and we all run up against the 24/7 constraint upon which I needn't elaborate to anyone. And then there's the fact that people narrow down their networks as the age.

So it is only to be expected that attempts to expand this range by use of social networks are immensely problematic: they are super unnatural and therefore we end up contorting ourselves within them in ways we scarcely understand. Some years ago in Princeton we had a "Topic Club" in which a bunch of us guys from the neighborhood got together and one guy made a presentation about something, which we then discussed. My friend Ted presented on the "attention economy," the idea that the web was all about people's eyeballs and attention and attracting them, and how if it was to be monetized we had a right to be paid for allocating our attention, and various constructs for doing so. But there is the obverse of that too. There is the distortive effect of everyone seeking attention all the time, what that does to us.