Conversing with Multitudes

This doesn't seem to be online at the moment, but there's an article by Clive Thompson in the Feb 2010 Wired called "In Praise of Obscurity" that I found interesting.

He talks about the way that online social networks are great at connecting people and letting them communicate, in some cases allowing for real interaction between, say, artists and fans, but how if one person gets a certain number of fans/friends/followers, the conversation dies out.

He suggests that when one person is talking to a whole bunch of other people, it becomes like broadcasting: you can no longer really expect--and tend not to get--actual conversational responses.

This makes sense when you think about it. It's a sort of scaled up, technology-abled counterpart to face-to-face communication. Thinking about it, I compared it to library instruction (my limited experience with teaching).

If you're showing someone something one-on-one, it's very informal and responsive, and you can solicit (and tend to receive) frequent feedback. "Does this make sense? Is there something else you'd like to know about that database?"

With a few people at a table, say, you have to formalize the presentation a little more, but there's still plenty of space for questions and answers. When you get larger groups into a classroom setting, it's less likely that people will ask questions--maybe they ask the person next to them instead, or maybe they just don't ask at all because they hesitate to interrupt what has to become a fairly formal class.

And once you're addressing a lecture hall or an auditorium, you almost never get any sort of response. If you were talking to, I don't know, a football stadium full of people (has anyone ever done library instruction for a football stadium?), it would only be more pronounced.

At that level every person feels like an anonymous member of a crowd: they know the person speaking can't focus specifically on them, so they don't bother (or feel comfortable) asking for individual attention in the way that a person in a group of 10 might. (And on the flip side, you can invite a response in a small group and, if you let the silence drag out long enough, someone will almost always speak up, due to the pressure of expectation being divided among only enough people that each one can be individually identified...where if you let the silence linger in a football stadium, I imagine you could be out of luck.)

The article suggests that online you can keep the 'personal touch' capability in a social network of more people, up into a few thousands (where a real-time face-to-face conversation involving 3,000 people would obviously be unworkable), but that once you get to several thousands the anonymizing aspects of the crowd kick in and people stop conversing even if they're all technically linked up in the same network.

At that point, I suppose, it makes sense to split into smaller more specially-focused groups again, maybe sub-groups of whatever it was that brought you to the main group in the first place. If it was a network of cupcake aficionados, say, maybe you subdivide into chocolate and vanilla groups, lavishly frosted and simple, etc.

I think we see this happen in all kinds of ways, really. It seems like a part of the way human attention works.

I mean, how many viewers complained about the TV show Heroes having too many major characters to really focus on? (Not just me, right?) To me, anyway, it seemed that the storyline fractured after a while because we never spent enough time with any one character to actually care what happened to them.

There were a lot of potentially interesting characters there, but we didn't get to know them, so we lost interest. And by 'we' I am here speaking for myself and my spouse--we stopped watching it partway through the second season, not because we disliked it but because we couldn't be bothered to follow it anymore. We couldn't maintain interest, essentially.

It also reminds me of how, when I was a kid, I figured out that more toys did not necessarily mean more pleasure in said toys: if you have a lot of something, then it's not as special to you anymore.

I enjoyed my tiny twistie dolls (we always said 'twistie,' although you may be more familiar with the term 'twist tie'), and since we had plenty of materials I had the power to make dozens--hundreds!--but I found that it was more fun to make a few, focus on them, and give them names and personalities and long exciting sagas of adventure.

I could only really focus on (develop relationships with, in social terms) a limited number of them. If I had 300 tiny dolls, how well could I really know any of them? How much energy could I devote to telling and enjoying the individual stories I made up for them?

We just can't care about multitudes of things the same way we care about a select few things. We don't have the energy, or the attention, or the time. So I guess it makes sense that we just can't converse with multitudes the same way we can with a select few (even if that select few, online, might be hundreds or more).

And online conversations can be spread out over time as well as among people. I wonder if that's involved somehow. Maybe we can pay attention to more people a little bit at a time. Anyway, it's fascinating stuff.

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