sociology as free jazz · 2006-11-26 20:57

For work, for play, I’ve been thinking a lot about how people manage and mediate their social contact and contacts, in particular, about the different channels or methods of communication, and the mixes of channels people use. I’ve also had the Dunbar number quoted at me several times, which I’m rapidly concluding is bullshit.

So I’m positing a few things, and would like a friendly academic sociologist smackdown (you know who you are):

the strength of social contact between people cannot be measured by frequency or intensity; a better measure is the number of communication channels used by people

and

the number of social contacts you can maintain on a communication mechanism is inversely proportional to the average frequency of communication and the synchronicity of communication

The thought behind the first is the progressive revealing of contact methods as you get to know someone, whether physically, through business cards, moocards, or similar, or online, when handles, usernames, phone numbers or addresses are given or exchanged.

The second comes from playing with twitter – I know I can’t handle as many friends on it as, say, Flickr, and certainly not as many as email.

Comments gratefully received.

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