overload and natural limits
July 20, 2006
I am wandering about the natural limits that we have as humans in processing information, adapting to new environments, establishing and maintaining social contacts…. there are limits to all this and we are facing at the same time more and more technology that suggests us a support with these activities.
Actually I have the feeling that I am sometimes even overwhelmed with the amount of technological support and with selecting the best tools for my personal environment. Since I am currently working on these aspects also in the context of our research project iCamp I am reflecting especially on online social networking practices.
Combining my own experiences with some of the recent literature on social networks, social captial , social software, …. I must say that I am currently experiencing more and more the physical limits of networking. There have been these figures around that a person may maintain up to around 150 contacts or so and I think I already reached this limit.
So what’s the point in having technical solutions available that help me to establish more contacts when at the same time I am not able to keep up with the relationsships that I already have? For the moment I wil try to use this weblog to allow some people I know to read from me from time to time. But is this a valid solution? When I think about it and imagine that all of my contacts would be writing weblogs (maybe they already do and I just have not realised it ;-)) I would definitly not be able to follow all of them.
This brings me back to Ton’s statement, which he pronounced at the workshop that we had in Vienna during the EDEN 2006 Conference, where he proposed to do some social filtering. He would not read primary sources anymore, but use people and what they write as filters to get to interesting resources. Will be interesting to hear from Ton when he reaches the point of having too may social filters.
technorati tags:social networks
July 21, 2006 at 1:44 pm
Hi Barbara,
interesting and important questions.
I think the basic problem: how to process more information while our personal capacity to process information remains the same, has been solved countless generations before ours: offload clues and cues into your environment. Whether it’s cutting markings into a tree, or using a feedreader to store incoming blog items is not essentially different.
Whenever the amount of information to keep track of increases, because our world is becoming richer in connections, we need to learn new ways of offloading clues to our environment.
When I propose to more consciously (since we’ve always been doing it unconsciously, calling it gossip and referrals) use social networks as our filter it is for two reasons:
First to diminish the amount of incoming information with; I assume the number of relations to keep track of grows less fast and is always smaller, than the amount of information that flows through these relationships.
And second to give information its much needed context, which makes it easier to recall afterwards, and also allows you to more or less forget the information, as long as re-entering the social context triggers you to remember or refind the information.
Most of the time it is enough for me to remember that there is a forest near my home, and when I actually enter that forest, this triggers the information about the specific trees, plants and animals there. But I don’t need to keep all those specifics at hand, when I am not in that context, then it is enough to merely refer to it as ‘the forest’.
I think you are right that applying this strategy, social networks as filters, has its limits as well of course. But is does increase the scale or what you can manage. I don’t have to know which specific trees are burning, to know the forest’s on fire. Likewise I don’t have to closely follow all conversations in a community, as long as I am aware of the general conversation in this community. Communities are my forests in this sense. Bundles of relationships, and those scale even better than just relationships. Most of the time, pattern watching is enough to keep track, and when needed you can always ‘walk into the forest’ to have a look at a specific tree, zooming in on a conversation or a piece of information.
So what is our maximum social capacity. Indeed the number 150 comes up a lot, Dunbar’s number. Thing is, this number stems from an extrapolation of comparing the size of grooming communities of apes to their brainsize and then calculating that backwards starting with human brain size. Dunbar sees 150 people as the maximum we can keep up a connection with by grooming. He also suggested that the invention of language helped us overcome that limit of 150.
To me the number of 150 feels like a number you can naturally feel comfortable with, and it seems to be the size of a lot of historical organisational units, nomad tribes, army companies etc. But at the same time I have a feeling that it is highly contextual as well. You can easily juggle the social data of 150 people in your head, but you can just as easily switch to another set of data about 150 people when you switch context, I would say. A large party for instance, or your old university fraternities e-mailing list, or your previous employer etc. All these different sets of 150 people you are and have been part of. When you change the context, you slip into the patterns of another group of 150 as if you slip on a well-worn coat. At least that is how it feels to me.
At this point in my feedreader, having 430+ RSS feeds, it starts to feel crowded. I can very well imagine that I will soon start grouping the feeds, not based on content or theme, but based on the different communities the authors belong to. I suspect that this would naturally scale to 150 communities of 150 people, which makes 22.500 people. It would be interesting to know how for instance Robert Scoble orders his feeds, as he follows somewhere around 1300-1600.
July 26, 2006 at 4:44 pm
good point, Ton, I agree with you on the contextual argument. However I already have problems with following some 30 rss feeds
The other thing is that it seems rather superficial when we talk about relationsships. Ok, we all know about the strenght of “weak ties” since Granovetter, but still, I think that even for these weak ties it takes some time and dedication to establish some sort of relationship, creating trust and confidence. Otherwise, just reading a feed does not mean that there is any further relationship behind it.
July 26, 2006 at 9:11 pm
I agree Barbara,
There needs to be some form of regular interaction going on, before I would deem a contact a relationship. Having met in a meaningful context helps, having other channels where you are aware of eachother (IM buddy lists, Skype lists, shared communities, Flickr photo comments etc) does as well. And also it is not about one singular RSS feed but multiple ones. Blog, flickr, delicious, events in on-line calendars, Plazes,are all sources for traces that can be tracked through RSS.
Adding RSS feeds can also be the start of building a relationship, starting to comment on eachother, or even more basic, through linking to the other’s stuff.
Trust building is key here as you say, for both weak and strong ties, as trust is what enables you to judge the information you get from someone, it is what enables your social network as a filter in the first place. And trust building does not scale easily to thousands of people.
It does scale better in trusting communities. And for communities you don’t have to know/trust/believe all participants to be right. As long as the group is probabilistically right, you’re doing fine.
September 19, 2006 at 9:46 am
Communities are my forests…
… Ton Zijlstra commenting at length on barbarak’s blog on how to deal with “information overload” in the new 2.0 environment. yes, that seems to be the most urgent question to be solved now: finding some patterns and routines for…
September 30, 2006 at 5:57 pm
BarCamp Vienna
After a flight that killed my ears (I have a terrible cold, and cabin pressure doesn’t help), Elmine and I ended up at BarCamp Vienna. It turned out someone had already put my name up on the roster to do…
October 10, 2006 at 3:33 pm
Hi Barbara,
Well thinking latelly about this Information Overload is really here to stay and, even get worse. So i think that Taoism (flow, bend like grass over the flows of information) its the best to go. Its still a bit “new age” but i think that somehow we may have Cyber-Taoist applications that helps us to go with the flow of information instead of pushing us down with so big big overload.