Dunbar’s number and material self: a case for ‘friending’ companion objects?
Considering that an average European owns ~10K objects, I wonder what Dunbar’s number can teach us about human-object relations.
As a thought experiment, think of the time it would take to launch one or more digital media applications to render an exhaustive list of (a) people you consider to be ‘loved ones’, ‘friends’ or ‘professional connections’ versus the time it would take to conjure (b) an exhaustive list of all physical possessions you ‘love’ or consider ‘mine’.
Looking beyond semantic ambiguities of terms like ‘loved ones’, ’friends’ and ‘professional connections’, ’mine’ and ‘possession’, it seems safe to assume that a majority of people would find it more challenging and time-consuming to produce the second list. Although, this would not be so difficult if everyone had a social network of things in their pocket like so many do for friends and professional connections (e.g Facebook and Linkedin).
The vast number of human-object connections — through which our material self comes into existence — outnumbers human-to-human ties of the social self. The human-to-human category of connections seems to level out — according to Dunbar’s number — at a ratio of one (person) to somewhere between 150 to 250 strong social ties (i.e. “meaningful social relations”, Dunbar et. al. 2017), thus excluding weaker social ties related to e.g. ‘professional connections’. In contrast to Dunbar’s number, what we might term the human-object distribution ratio (HODR) of an average person living in Germany is as much as; one person per 10,000 nonhuman possessions according to historian Frank Trentmann, 2016.
As we look further into how today’s digital media shape our material selves, one could take inspiration from a former psychological study by Ernst Prelinger from 1959: Extension and Structure of the Self and explore estimations of an object’s centrality relative to the relational and networked material self using Prelinger’s 0–3 scale and item rating from “not-self” to “self”. Prelinger asked research participants to place items within the four categories (0, 1, 2, 3) to test William James’s notion that ‘possessions are viewed as part of self’ (Belk 1988). Based on the item-ratings by research participants, Prelinger derived mean “self” scores for 160 items across eight item categories.
The question is: what can we learn from Prelinger’s study, and can we apply a similar method in today’s context to assess how digital mediation plays a role in the configuration and perceptions of material selfhood? For sure, the material self is somehow entangled with contemporary social media networks that have changed and taught us about digitally augmented human socialisation, as we may recall with reference to Dunbar’s number (Dunbar et. al. 2017).
What might digital and social media teach us about the changes and nature of contemporary material selfhood and our relationship with ‘external tokens of the self’ as William Gibson describes possessions in his book Pattern Recognition?
Searching for digital media of the material self
Beyond some especially cherished or sentimental analogue possessions (Kirk and Sellen 2010; Belk 2013; Ackerman and Jones 2016), most people do not have a digital dossier of actionable digital simulacra that signify personal possessions that fall under the rubric of ‘inventory’, ‘wanted’, ‘purchased’, ‘sold’, ‘loved’, or ‘mine’ (see for instance Goat.).
For sure, though, people living with digital technologies do, of course, use various kinds of digital-material signifiers in everyday life. They use key words when searching Google for a particular pair of shoes nearby during so-called ‘want-to-buy’ moments (Mooney and Johnsmeyer 2015; Meeker 2018); when typing a grocery list into a smartphone application like Remember the Milk; when listing triathlete gear in Strava; when sharing board games on Kallax.io; when uploading an image of an item for sale on eBay and GOAT; or, when searching for “puke bags” in a computer inventory management system aboard the International Space Station (viz. Scott Kelly 2017).
However, the vast reservoir of user information about our individual purchase histories, and the products we search for, buy and discard, is largely inaccessible to the average person — also, because the average person probably does not use tedious personal inventory management systems and wardrobe apps. That is to say, our purchase histories and consumer information is largely stored as somewhat abstract data on our devices or in databases governed by companies like Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and less well-known firms like Nielsen and Acxiom. Thinking back on William Mitchell’s book, (Me++ 2003), we know that some seemingly ‘free-floating’ objects within our social fabric, whether on earth or in a microgravity environment, is bound “to specific spatial and temporal settings […] by digital information [that] adds a layer of meaning to a physical [object], and the physical [object] helps to establish the meaning of the digital information”.
Still, as I write about here, it is not entirely clear how the presence or absence of digital-material mediation contributes to an enactment of objects more long-term as social ‘affiliative’ (Suchman 2004), ‘companion’ (O’Gorman 2015; Haraway 2003) and/or re-usable objects on one hand, and monstrous, ‘alienated, undesirable, devalued [and] obsolete’ objects on the other. Beyond the cyber-physical networks of supply chains, e-commerce and retail distribution — organised around standardised universal product codes (UPCs) and emerging blockchain technologies (see, for example, Evrythng.com) — it seems as if, to use the words of Bruno Latour (2005):
’a damning curse [has] been cast onto things. They remain asleep like the servants of some enchanted castle […] they exist [in the background] but they are [… rarely] given a social thought. Like humble servants they live on the margins of the social doing [important or no] work but never allowed to be represented as such. There seems to be no way, no conduit, no entry point for them to be knitted together with the same [digital material fabric] as the rest of the social ties” (Latour 2005a, added emphasis).
Latour highlights the importance of the re-presentation of things (see also Latour 2005b) if we are to turn our attention towards perhaps ’blindingly obvious’ (Miller 2010) yet somewhat ‘missing masses’ (Latour 1992) of domestic and public material politics. These domains include objects that are either directly related to everyday life or indirectly serving or polluting the latter from the shadows, devoid of virtual illumination, as either “vital” or “obsolete” background matter (Shove 2017).
Moreover, if we take seriously the notion that there exist socio-computational terms of admission into the fray of digitally mediated realities and that digital mediation shapes the socio-materiality of physical objects (meaning how things are understood and dealt with), then we should, arguably, strive to understand the terms on which the nonorganic external tokens of the material self are being codified digitally and cared for as ‘commodities’, ‘resources’, ‘friends’ or ‘companions’.
Taking a software studies perspective (see eg. Fuller et al. 2008), we can explore the intersection of culture, everyday life and the literal computational codification of things outside the scope of our biological functions. The latter is certainly tracked more meticulously than the nonhuman parts of the material self. Indeed, digital self-tracking of corporeal biological processes, such as exercise, sleep and food-intake, is becoming an increasingly normalised practice in everyday life as the ‘quantified self’ self-tracking movement is gaining interest and support by digital devices (Pink and Fors 2017; Nef and Nafus 2016).
Meanwhile, it seems that our personal external matter (ie. thousands of external tokens of the self) is less eagerly inventoried, monitored, or ‘befriended’ than than our bodily functions (organic part of material self) and the social self (human-to-human relations).
Other stories about digitally mediated relations to personal belongings (“companion objects”):
