Illustration: Helen Yentus and Jason Booher

When it comes to your social network, bigger is better. Or so we’re told. The more followers and friends you have, the more awesome and important you are. That’s why you see so much oohing and aahing over people with a million Twitter followers. But lately I’ve been thinking about the downside of having a huge online audience. When you go from having a few hundred Twitter followers to ten thousand, something unexpected happens: Social networking starts to break down.

Consider the case of Maureen Evans. A grad student and poet, Evans got into Twitter at the very beginning — back in 2006 — and soon built up almost 100 followers. Like many users, she enjoyed the conversational nature of the medium. A follower would respond to one of her posts, other followers would chime in, and she’d respond back.

Then, in 2007, she began a nifty project: tweeting recipes, each condensed to 140 characters. She soon amassed 3,000 followers, but her online life still felt like a small town: Among the regulars, people knew each other and enjoyed conversing. But as her audience grew and grew, eventually cracking 13,000, the sense of community evaporated. People stopped talking to one another or even talking to her. “It became dead silence,” she marvels.

Why? Because socializing doesn’t scale. Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote. “They feel they can’t possibly be the person who’s going to make the useful contribution,” Evans says. So the conversation stops. Evans isn’t alone. I’ve heard this story again and again from those who’ve risen into the lower ranks of microfame. At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun — but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting.

The lesson? There’s value in obscurity.

After all, the world’s bravest and most important ideas are often forged away from the spotlight — in small, obscure groups of people who are passionately interested in a subject and like arguing about it. They’re willing to experiment with risky or dumb concepts because they’re among intimates. (It was, after all, small groups of marginal weirdos that brought us the computer, democracy, and the novel.)

Technically speaking, online social-networking tools ought to be great at fostering these sorts of clusters. Blogs and Twitter and Facebook are, as Internet guru John Battelle puts it, “conversational media.” But when the conversation gets big enough, it shuts down. Not only do audiences feel estranged, the participants also start self-censoring. People who suddenly find themselves with really huge audiences often start writing more cautiously, like politicians.

When it comes to microfame, the worst place to be is in the middle of the pack. If someone’s got 1.5 million followers on Twitter, they’re one of the rare and straightforwardly famous folks online. Like a digital Oprah, they enjoy a massive audience that might even generate revenue. There’s no pretense of intimacy with their audience, so there’s no conversation to spoil. Meanwhile, if you have a hundred followers, you’re clearly just chatting with pals. It’s the middle ground — when someone amasses, say, tens of thousands of followers — where the social contract of social media becomes murky.

Maybe we should be designing tools that reward obscurity — that encourage us to remain in the shadows. Or what if they warned us when our social circles became unsustainably large? Sure, we’d be connected with fewer people, but we’d be communicating with them, and not just talking at them.

 

In our search for more and more followers and friends, this article presents an interesting viewpoint. I especially like the illustration.

Some professors don’t let students see their Facebook pages. Some accept students’ invitations but don’t initiate them.

Peter Juvinall insists students friend him.

The Illinois State University instructor decided the best way to connect with a bunch of freshman business students in a short 8 a.m. class was to conduct much of the course where they are anyway—on Facebook.

So, as he explained during last week’s Educause conference and in a subsequent interview, he uses Facebook as a course-management system by instructing students to “friend” his personal page on the first day of class.

On the scale of pushing the privacy boundary, it doesn't come close to the stuff some other professors have done—stuff like, oh, posing as a student to snoop on your online classes. But still: Is this going too far?

Mr. Juvinall, who teaches a required technology course, says the reaction is "99.9999 percent positive." One or two students have had a problem with it, he says. He worked with them to explain how to adjust Facebook's privacy settings, something many of his students have done to limit what he can see.

"I don’t browse their profiles anyway," Mr. Juvinall says.

Beyond grading—that's private—he does use the site for all outside-the-classroom functions. Students post questions on the "wall" of his profile. They submit assignments on their profiles. If they need help and they're online at the same time he is, he lets them chat with him live. One took him up on the offer at midnight on a Saturday.

Teaching on Facebook works with one of Mr. Juvinall's main messages: that students should think of their online presence as a digital resume. Employers have been known to ask alumni to check out the Facebook pages of job candidates, he points out, since some Facebook users allow anyone within their university's network to view their profiles.

“I tell them, you need to assume anybody can read whatever you put out there at any time—forever,” Mr. Juvinall says.

There is an expiration date on what Mr. Juvinall can read, however. At the end of the semester, he "defriends" all his students.

Facebook as a course management system. What will they think of next?

A revolution in the science of social networks began with a stash of old papers found in a storeroom in Framingham, Massachusetts. They were the personal records of 5,124 male and female subjects from the Framingham Heart Study. Started in 1948, the ongoing project has revealed many of the risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease, including smoking and hypertension.

In 2003, Nicholas Christakis, a social scientist and internist at Harvard, and James Fowler, a political scientist at UC San Diego, began searching through the Framingham data. But they didn't care about LDL cholesterol or enlarged left ventricles. Rather, they were drawn to a clerical quirk: The original Framingham researchers noted each participant's close friends, colleagues, and family members.

"They asked for follow-up purposes," Christakis says. "If someone moved away, the researchers would call their friends and try to track them down."

Christakis and Fowler realized that this obsolete list of references could be transformed into a detailed map of human relationships. Because two-thirds of all Framingham adults participated in the first phase of the study, and their children and children's children in subsequent phases, almost the entire social network of the community was chronicled on these handwritten sheets. It took almost five years to extract the data—the handwriting was often illegible—but the scientists eventually constructed a detailed atlas of associations in which every connection was quantified.

The two researchers thought the Framingham social network might demonstrate how relationships directly influence behavior and thus health and happiness. Since the study had tracked its subjects' weight for decades, Christakis and Fowler first analyzed obesity. Clicking through the years, they watched the condition spread to nearly 40 percent of the population. Fowler shows me an animation of their study—30 years of data reduced to 108 seconds of shifting circles and lines. Each circle represents an individual. Size is proportional to body mass index; yellow indicates obesity. "This woman is about to get big," Fowler says. "And look at this cluster. They all gain weight at about the same time."

Obesity: Fat By Association

In 1948, fewer than 10 percent of Framingham residents were obese. By 1985, 18 percent were, and today about 40 percent are. What changed? Social norms of diet and physical appearance. "A bunch of people discovered fast food at the same time," social scientist Christakis says. "Then the network took over."

Obese person*

Nonobese person*

Friendship/marital connection

Familial connection

Unlike a flu epidemic, which starts with one infection, the scattered cases of obesity on early network maps indicated a multicentric contagion.

Obesity radiated outward from clusters of overweight people.

The condition's virulent infection rate led to dramatic clumping as weight classes self-segregated.

Having an obese spouse raised the risk of becoming obese by 37 percent. If a friend became obese, the risk skyrocketed by 171 percent.

Lean individuals surrounded by obesity were rare.

*Circle size corresponds to body mass index

Images based on graphics created by James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis

How do the people you hang out with influence you?