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Population Density in the Online Global Village

The ability to meet more and more people online and manage those relationships is a great and seductive thing, but there's a downside for social connectors who want to meet, well, everybody. Sooner or later you have a couple of databases that are difficult to manage - the one that lives in various corners of your virtual environment, and the one that lives in wetware, in brain cells that can grow only so far before your head explodes. Adina Levin writes a consideration of this problem...

Tools will surely be helpful. Databases have long helped salespeople remember the names of the children and pets of their customers. Tools can surely be improved. The Linked In form for passing on a reference request is a social horror -- it turns the pleasant, virtuous, social capital-building experience of recommending a friend into a guilt-inducing, bureacratic obligation.

Chris Allen also rightly points out that the problem isn't just in the interfaces, it's in the social situation created by online network exposure to hundreds of acquaintances; far more than the human capacity for close connection.

We'll also need novels, advice columns, tutorials -- as much or more than tool features -- to handle the social and ethical dilemmas of life in the virtual city.

jon posted this at 10:01 PM
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