It’s true – we really do message people who sit next to us the most
I often rely on these series of diagrams by Sam Lawrence to show how we’ve almost done an evolutionary full circle from the tribal networks to the neo tribal ones.
So we are connected to communities of interests that are not necessarily defined by geography – online gaming is a good example of where that happens.
In fact there is also a completely contradictory trend, summed up by that decade-old stereotype of the office worker who emails or facebooks the person next to him / her.
And a study by Hebrew University did indeed show: The majority of communication is to people we already know. And the closer they are, the more frequent the messages.
Academics Jacob Goldenberg and Moshe Levy looked at the habits of 100k US Facebook users broken down by zip / postcode (source Trend Spotting and Technology Review).
Their conclusion was: “While it is just as easy to e-mail somebody who lives on the same street as somebody on the other side of the world, it turns out that we have a huge preference for sending messages over shorter distances.”
Hence because we have a preference for sharing messages with people who we have a personal connection with, the whole small world or neo-tribal network theory needs to be evaluated.
Well, yes and no. And the first comment in response to the Technology Review article, which talks about the findings, sums it up perfectly:
“How many foreigners did -your- grandmother communicate with in an average month ? For that matter, how many people living more than 10 miles from her did she communicate with in the same month ?”
In other words, it’s acceptable to conclude that online and social networks have both a deepening and broadening affect on our way of communicating, with the two not being mutually exclusive.
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