Edward T. Hall meets ThoughtFarmer

I read the Hidden Dimension in second year university doing my undergraduate degree in Communications. Working in IT, it's not often you get to dust an anthropology book from the 1960's, but Hall's notion of proxemics seemed like a fitting backdrop for trying to put a structure to the social software problem of activity notifications and the potential firehouse of information you can be drinking from in a busy corporate social intranet, like those that ThoughtFarmer affords.

So it's a work in progress, but today I blogged about the proxemics of the intranet over at the ThoughtFarmer blog. I think it's got some legs and is a meaningful way of thinking about the gravity of content, interpersonal relationships in an enterprise 2.0 setting, and the problems of notification / activity monitoring in complex information environments.

Should be interesting to hear what people think.