Fair warning: I'm not a physicist, sociologist or scientist of any kind. I found a couple of studies, they've been sitting in my head for a week, and apparently the only way to get them out is to write about them. So this is less "here's how it works" and more "look what I found."
It started with kids. Or, more precisely, with scientists putting radio tags on preschoolers.
Kids on a playground behave like a state of matter
A team at the University of Miami put high-precision radio tags on preschoolers and watched how they moved. Not where they ran or what they played, but how they arranged themselves relative to each other. This did not sound especially exciting to me at first.
Then I read what they found.
In the 2024 study, when the kids had plenty of room, they moved a bit like a gas: moving around, bumping into each other, separating again. Put them in a tighter space and they started forming small, more stable groups, closer to droplets of liquid. Some stayed together, others moved in and out. The researchers describe it as a phase transition. Except the particles are preschoolers and the container is a daycare room.
This isn't entirely new either. Physicists have been using similar models for crowds and pedestrians for decades. Back in 1992, pedestrian movement was already being described with a "gas-kinetic Boltzmann model." There is also a whole field called active matter, which studies things that use their own energy to move: bacteria, fish, birds and, depending on the paper you're reading, apparently us.
This was already enough to send me down a hole. Then I found the second paper.
Then they went and measured the distance
In a 2026 paper, the same team looked at orientation: not just where the children were, but which way they were facing.
At distances below roughly sixty-five centimeters, the children tended to stand side by side, facing in the same direction. Farther apart, they were more likely to face each other. The change was surprisingly sharp rather than gradual. The authors describe it as a phase transition, although the reviewers are a little more cautious about how much the data can support that language.
But the part that stayed with me was much simpler: someone had actually measured the distance.
There is a number, in centimeters, where the way these kids relate to each other changes. And I spend most of my day in a place where distance supposedly doesn't exist at all.
Except each of us has our own room
This is where the comparison starts becoming less convenient.
The kids have one physical room. Its walls are in the same place for everyone. A feed doesn't work like that. The algorithm builds a different version for each person. My Instagram and yours have the same logo at the top, but they're not really the same room.
We're all supposedly inside the same network while seeing different people, in a different order, at different frequencies. Even the size of the room changes depending on what the algorithm decides to put near you that day.
So the gas-in-a-flask comparison only gets me so far. The flask, at least, has the decency to stay put.
And with AI I've stopped understanding what I'm even made of
This is where I wandered quite a long way from the paper.
The physics works with a fairly useful assumption: one particle has one physical location. A molecule doesn't leave a second version of itself at the other end of the room while the original goes for lunch.
My online life has become less tidy.
A couple of years ago I didn't trust AI much at all. The mistakes were easy to see: six fingers, broken text, confidently ridiculous answers. In retrospect, there was something comfortable about that. Then it got better, I started using it for more things, and somewhere along the way it became my pocket techie. I write with it, build with it, research with it and publish through it.
So while reading about these children as particles, I started wondering what exactly counts as my particle now. Just me? Me plus an agent? It can publish something I prepared while I'm asleep. It can work across several services while I'm physically sitting in one chair doing something else. My body still has one location. My activity doesn't.
This is not, to be clear, my attempt to introduce a new state of matter. I have enough problems getting software through review without taking on physics.
But it did make something about feeds feel less mysterious to me. They can feel much more crowded without there necessarily being more people. One person can simply produce and appear in more places than they could before. Agents make that easier again.
So what distance is a follow, then?
Which brought me back to the sixty-five centimeters. If physical distance changes how the children orient toward each other, I started wondering what the equivalent distance might be online.
I have my own completely unmeasured version.
A like, a reaction or a quick comment feels face-to-face to me. I noticed you. For a moment my attention is pointed directly at you and whatever you just said.
A follow feels more like standing side by side. I'm not only looking at this one thing you did. I've decided I want to keep seeing what you're looking at next.
What amused me is that the order isn't completely unlike the playground observation. At a greater distance, the children are more often facing each other. Closer together, they're more often oriented in the same direction. My brain apparently decided that clicking Follow belongs somewhere in that second category.
There is absolutely no sixty-five-centimeter result for LinkedIn hiding in these papers. That's my part.
Although I could, of course, be making all of this up
And I probably am, at least partly. I haven't measured any of this. Maybe a like feels like standing beside someone to you: a small acknowledgment from somebody already on your side. Maybe following someone is more like sitting across from them because you want to watch what they do. The geometry could be completely different.
But now I really want somebody to measure it.
If children in a room have a distance where their orientation toward each other changes, I wonder whether online relationships have anything similar. Maybe it's a follow. Maybe the first DM. Maybe the first time you reply to somebody instead of just liking what they wrote.
I wrote this together with Claude: the philosophizing is mine, the structure and formatting are Claude's.
I don't know. But I'm curious how you'd arrange these if they were distances: a like, a comment, a repost, a follow, a DM. Which ones feel face-to-face to you, and which feel more like standing beside someone?
