The electronic diaspora as remainder

A good article in The Economist this week confirming my argument in the book that our networks are wholly different from our friends. While we have an average of 120 friends on Facebook, according to Facebook’s in-house sociologist Cameron Marlow, we tend only to communicate with an average of 10, for men, and 16, for women. The remainder are our loose electronic diaspora, that web of connections which the network theorists predicted would make information hurtle around the net at breakneck speed. These are also the people we end up broadcasting our lives to, and who we voyeuristically stare out our windows at in Cyburbia.