The former is about interactions, while the latter is about overall interpersonal information load-bearing capacity. You can probably interact intensely with a few people (like when a team of people is trying to launch a startup on pizza and late nights out of one person’s apartment), or twitter to a lot of people. On the spectrum between intimacy and caricature of your models of other people, there can be a varying mix.

The one twist is that as you grow older, you’ve had episodes of close interaction with increasing numbers of people who cannot go back to being caricatures. So gradually, maybe a form of entropy builds up and you run out of personal social computing ability.

Especially when it comes to dealing with “random crap”, it’s OK if you miss a few of them. So something running down the bottom of your screen, which scrolls or transitions discreetly to the next twit so as not to disturb your foreground task or your concentration, but which is there to see if you take your eyes off your work and relax.

Everybody lives in a fishbowl to a certain set of people – the 50 foot horizon. We just need to remove the geographic restriction but keep the number of people in your “inner circle” low (which happens naturally if it’s a 50 foot horizon). You could twit at different radii. e.g. update on relatively sensitive things like medical or financial events will go to only those who you deem part of your intimate clique. But one-line movie reviews like “Saw Blue Umbrella . Beautiful.” can go to everyone.

You are right about the effect: the few times I’ve met online buddies for the first time, it has had a dramatic effect in changing my opinion of them and toning down the violence of future interactions. Online dating has the same problem in reverse, thinking people to be more amazing than they are in person based on limited information and optimistic assumptions.

I totally hadn’t thought of the “random crap” you learn about people in the 50 foot zone that humanizes them. This is I think a pretty important point that relates to the frame problem in AI. AI reasoning/planning systems often make the closed-world assumption to deal with the problem of exploding numbers of irrelevant predicates to keep track of. You simply assume that any proposition not asserted is false. This solves the problem of unnecessarily worrying about block A being on top of block B while you are reasoning about how to restack blocs C, D, E and F. But it happens at the cost of not knowing what else is true about the environment that you don’t need to know for your immediate problem. In the long run, developing a coarse model of the whole world is smarter than the closed world assumption, and I think you’d compute more efficiently if you did that. Real human thinking is somewhat smarter than closed world AI methods, but not by much. Couple of recent books (“Stumbling on Happiness” is one) really look at how we are wired to make assumptions about things we don’t know.

So the key question is, how do you humanize the people at the other end of the world without making everybody live in a fishbowl?

There is a clear and obvious ordering of “email less than voice less than face2face” when it comes to humanization of the participants. So, like you say, we do need conference calls (audio and video) and physical visits apart from email to deal with greater than X distances.

The Monkeysphere article makes an even stronger assertion: that we are actually incapable of recognizing, empathizing and treating more than this number of people as fully human. All others are caricatures, movie extras, the redshirt guys on the Star Trek away teams. Another important point made is that simply knowing random human facts about someone immediately tugs at our empathy, and makes the person more “real”.

This is hardly a new idea; every hack writer knows about “character development” and tries to embed quirks and idiosyncrasies in their characters in the hope that it makes them plausible. But it’s still amazing to watch this play out in real life. I’ve seen six months of email cold wars disappear over a single lunch, as you realize that the other chap is not, like you’d secretly suspected, a horned devil whose sole purpose in life was to harass you with review comments, but a rather mild-mannered guy with 3 kids, whose Deathly Hallows predictions happen to match your own.

There is a clear and obvious ordering of email and physical visits apart from email to deal with > X distances. Not just to overcome issues with email between the Antipodes which stem from very long round trip times, but also to subtly remind everyone that they are dealing with humans on the other side, rather than email addresses. A single physical visit can have long lasting consequences on the nature and tone of further email conversations.

Which brings me to my last point: one of the defining characteristics of the 50 foot radius is that you are exposed to random, useless facts about the people contained in there. This is both the cause and the effect of striking casual, spontaneous conversations. You know that A has started tennis lessons, that B’s kid has been paining her for a bicycle. They know that you’re going to Delhi this weekend. You might ask A the next day how his lesson went. As per the Monkeysphere principle, it’s these trivia (otherwise informationally useless), which significantly contribute towards humanizing these people to us and vice versa, bringing them closer to membership in our own “tribe”.

Twitter is similar, but a one-way street. It lets you broadcast, casually, spontaneously, with a low barrier to entry, (like IM and unlike the deliberate purpose of email and blogging, which need more time and structure, thus have a high barrier to entry) something about yourself. I might know, that my friend across the world is visiting Home Depot, that another is slacking off from work and watching Life of Brian. These are not things which they would have emailed or called me about, but this is just the kind of trivia I know about my local friends simply by being around them. For people who haven’t met face to face at all, twitter would be even more useful as a “humanizer”. So it goes beyond cute; I think it has the potential to open up the 50 foot barrier to some extent. Imagine a voice twitter where you record and upload sound bites with your mobile/GPRS. Imagine playing sound-bites from your friends across the world, while driving, for instance. Compare to podcasts.

I didn’t think about the types of communication making a difference, but of course you are right there. Though sometimes you’ll need the >X and near-face2face experience, so I expect you are not always able to relegate US-India conversations to email.

Thanks for the reference to Dunbar’s number. Didn’t know such a thing existed. Reminds me of the stuff by Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape, and the Human Zoo), which defines a tribe as the largest social unit where you know everybody. His sense was that the limit was 20 if I recall correctly, but that came out of guesswork, not a regression equation like Dunbar. Our social instincts are only good enough for handling tribal dynamics. We need technological crutches (like family trees, phone books, LinkedIn) to handle larger numbers. One the face of it, 150 seems huge, especially if, as the article on Dunbar’s number suggests, you are talking about knowing the whole web of relationships, not just each individual. Assuming a small world type or scale free type social network, you’d need to keep track of about log(150) hierarchical or flat clusterings I think. At least its not as bad as 150*(150-1)/2, since most people won’t know each other.

For spontaneous, casual, face to face communication (different from goal-oriented, planned communication, like work-related or relationship-related) I find that the 50 foot rule works for me. If you’re not on the same floor and within 50 feet of me, you might as well be on the other side of the planet. (Things like twitter.com are trying to chip away at this)

For planned, goal-oriented communication, distance matters little: there’s no difference between 1 mile, 100 miles and 1000 miles. It only begins to matter when the earth curves and you’re no longer within the same “synchronous communication” time zones, at which point voice and IM give way to email as the default. i.e. I usually talk to UK folks, but email US folks.

So…as far as I am concerned, there are 3 levels of distance : 0-50 ft, 50ft – X (both parties can talk when they’re awake), > X. I am completely ignoring communication by physically moving your butt across country, when the difference between 1 and 1000 miles is substantial – too lazy.

Also: does social group size (Dunbar’s number – ~150) change with all these newfangled modes of communication? Not for me. Inside the Monkeysphere is a funny and insightful article on the same topic.