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.

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…

… 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…

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.

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.

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.