Does Media 2.0 Scale? When do we reach Saturation?

I have had this question in the back of my mind for a month now.

"Does Media 2.0 Scale"

If one of the tenets of being in 'Social Media' is for everyone to be... well... social - at one point does your ability to socialize reach saturation point?

To me, Robert Scoble is the best example of this emerging problem.

It seems to me that he is the ultimate Social Media 'celebrity'. He takes his social responsibility seriously. He lists his cell phone and email address on his website and responds to most of his email. He blogs like crazy and comments on blogs that mention him. He talks on panels and joins all sorts of crazy workgroups.

And now... he is adding every single one of his followers on Twitter as a friend!

This is at once both admirable and crazy. How can he possible keep up?

Surely he has (or soon will) reach the limits of his social scale.

I'd like to ask Robert, as one of Media 2.0's leading social celebrities, to write a post about how he deals with all these people coming at him asking for attention - how does he Pay Attention to everyone.

Consider also that if Robert is the new model of celebrity - where the host of your favourite TV show needs to be accessible and social - how does this kind of activity scale to mainstream levels.

Fill us in Robert!

What does everyone else think? Perhaps this is a follow on from the 'My Media Consumption Diet' meme. How do you decide what to ignore and how do you try to scale up your social interactions. How is it possible for more visible people to do the same. How can all of this 'level up' when social becomes mainstream?

Maybe scale is not a desirable effect though? If we scale our interactions up - do we not necessarily have to scale the depth of those interactions down?

Can blogging create World Peace?

I was chatting to an old (as in long term - I would never call her old) friend of mine today and we got to talking about Politics and Justice and all those light weight things (as you do). We are both very interested in those topics.

We got to talking about how the latest wave of social software might help improve the world. I almost alluded to it in a recent post about Web 3.0 (*cringe*).

We came up with this interesting line of thought (if you look closely you could imagine a small green Muppet saying the words).

War is based on fear, fear is based on ignorance, ignorance is based on a lack of information, lack of information is based on bad/biased editorializing and/or audience apathy

So by that logic – perhaps if we can further empower the mainstream to share their unedited stories it might actually broaden our understanding and acceptance of each other - even those scary people over there (that place that is different from ours). Perhaps if we are able to connect in new and powerful ways governments will be forced to listen to the will of their people in a way never before experienced. Perhaps transparency in government will improve.

If this were to occur to a sufficient scale, would ignorance not begin to dissipate and interconnectedness grow? Would fear begin to give way to understanding of commonalities. Would wars and injustice based on fear become extinct?

Apathy may still be a problem – anyone got any suggestions?

It is probably far too idealistic and naive - Maybe wars are not based on fear but rather on energy crisis’s - I just thought that it was a fun piece musing late on a Saturday night.