Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 347

Presumably a cocktail party is expected to fulfill the host's desire to get together a number of people who are inadequately acquainted and thereby arrange for bringing the level of acquaintance up to adequacy for future cooperative endeavors.

The party is usually in a room small enough so that all guests are within sight and hearing of one another.

The information is furnished by each of the guests, is sent by oral broadcasting over the air waves, and is received by the ears.

Since the air is a continuum, the network of communication remains intact regardless of the positions or motions of the points ( the people ) in the net.

As shown in Figure 1, there is a connection for communication between every pair of points.

This, and other qualifications, make the cocktail party the most complete and most chaotic communication system ever dreamed up.

All four types of message listed in Table 1 are permitted, although decorum and cocktail tradition require holding the commands to a minimum, while exclamations having complimentary intonations are more than customarily encouraged.

The completeness of the connections provide that, for N people, there are Af lines of communication between the pairs, which can become a large number ( 1,225 ) for a party of fifty guests.

Looking at the diagram, we see that Af connection lines come in to each member.

Thus the cocktail party would appear to be the ideal system, but there is one weakness.

In spite of the dreams of the host for oneness in the group, the Af incoming messages for each guest overload his receiving system beyond comprehension if N exceeds about six.

The crowd consequently breaks up into temporary groups ranging in size from two to six, with a half-life for the cluster ranging from three to twenty minutes.