Empirical evidence of information overload constraining chat channel community interactions

Prior work has demonstrated that the impact of individual information-processing limits can be observed in dynamics of mass interaction in asynchronous collaborative systems (Usenet newsgroups and email lists). Here we present the first evidence of such impacts on synchronous social interaction environments through the analysis of an Internet Relay Chat network. We highlight how shared public discourse in chat channels appears to be limited to 40 posters in any 20 minute interval, even as the number of channel users increases well into the hundreds. We discuss our findings in terms of understanding the relationship between online community space types and the user interaction dynamics they support.