overload and natural limits

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

an event you should not miss…

… although unfortunately I might miss it myself, is the blogtalk reloaded (Oct. 2-3, 2006, Vienna, Austria)
After a short phone conversation with Thomas Burg, one of the main organisers of this event, I just had a look at the conference website and it seems to be a good event for meeting up with researchers and practicioners around the topic of social software. It seems to be also a nice alternative to the highly academic events as I spotted some papers settled in the corporate and business context.

What a pitty that the EC-TEL conference will take place around the same time in Crete.

rome_easter_2006

PICT1512.JPG,
originally uploaded by barbara k.

this is me during my easter trip to rome in 2006 trying to escape the herds of tourists. i would not recommend rome during easter time unless you are really keen on crowds.

another go

after some first explorative tries with blogs, this is another one of these goes. but let’s see how this works in combination with flock

the things that I will most probably discuss about here is this blog is on issues related to networking over the net. so I figured it must be time for me to start being more present myself on the web….

technorati tags:general

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