As Dunbar pointed out, the amount of social capital at our disposal is ultimately limited by our time and attention: "If you garner connections with more people, you end up distributing your fixed amount of social capital more thinly so the average capital per person is lower.” My observation of Extremely Online people is that it's easy to butter your bread too thinly. Partly this is a problem of scale, but there are also inevitable trade-offs between time spent building social capital and time spent actually deploying it: I can't help but be suspicious whether anyone hanging out on Twitter
...more
