Allen Curves and Social Media - Plus ca Change?

In the days of yore when I was doing my MSc, before Inter-Networks were called the Internet, and we were trying to get a grip on what this new New Thing was, I studied a lot of Information Theory. And a hot off the presses at the time was a book was written by MiT's Prof Thomas Allen, that talked about the Allen Curve (above). In essence, it says that the further apart people are physically, the less they communicvate - even over telephones and so on. In essnce, physical contact drives electronic contact.

(Incidentally, Allen also discovered Information Gatekeepers, those people who connected and conveyed vital knowledge from just the right people to just the right other people in the organization, decades before Malcolm Gladwell rebottled them)

Anyway, the neuron in my brain that had this fact was rudely wakened today when I came across his latest book (from 2006), which looks at the impact of Social Meedja on the Allen Curve. Given the massive reduction in comms transactions costs over the 30 years (good lord - is it really...) since the Allen Curve was first plotted and the ubiquity of agressively gamified inclusive social network architectures, you'd think the curve would have been attenuated somewhat, in multi-degrees of freedom, no?

No.

He found that:

"rather than finding that the probability of telephone communication increases with distances, as face-to-face probability decays, our data show a decay in the use of all communication media with distance (following a near field rise)".

In other words, face to face still drives social contact.

Except, I know of an exception. Since the days of the textnet, I know I have reached further, wider etc etc in one area - my "communities of interest" - the other sad sacks who are interested in the more esoteric things things that I am. There, it was the other way around. I found them because they were interested in the stuff I am, and the digital comms were flowing thick and fast long befire the (inevitable) face to face meetings occurred.

So, I have formulated Alan's Corollary to the Allen Curve, on a whim, in this post. It states that the attractiveness of the topic being communicated can over-ride the "physical drives digital comms" formula. The power of content trumps the power of comms, for this case. For day to day dross (the content of the lions share of any Social Network content), the Allen Curve is correct, but when you're talking about, say, the music of cult geek bands of the 70's then we're all in the same place, sitting together - and this town ain't big enough*...

*Look at the spelling on the synth. Cool hey?