Brave New World of Digital Intimacy

This fascinating article from NYT about Facebook news feed and twitter/microblogging answers almost (if not all) of my questions: why people tweet?

The short answer is new technical term called ambient awareness.

I'll try to describe a longer answer with my new & experimental writing technique: 'ambient writing' (a new catchphrase for 'lazy copy & paste'). Anyway, with my own emphasis and quick thought.

It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye.

because a blog post is usually a written piece, sometimes quite long: a statement of opinion, a story, an analysis. But these new updates are something different. They’re far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered.

Example.

Each so-called tweet was so brief as to be virtually meaningless. But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before.

Yet another example :P

Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.

Right. Now we all can predict when @sugree wakes up, leaves home and goes to bed.

This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating.

If one does, we call him/her "เสือก".

The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it. “It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,” Haley went on to say.

IMO, @pphetra masters this skill. If you don't know him, then follow him.

It can also lead to more real-life contact, because when one member of Haley’s group decides to go out to a bar or see a band and Twitters about his plans, the others see it, and some decide to drop by — ad hoc, self-organizing socializing.

Right. I have seen several go-for-movie appointments on my twittersphere.

And when they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they’ve never actually been apart. They don’t need to ask, “So, what have you been up to?” because they already know. Instead, they’ll begin discussing something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.

All of my twitter friends seem to know about @kengggg's dog.

“No message is the single-most-important message. It’s sort of like when you’re sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.”

I just wonder how does it compare with old school IRC? I've never be an IRC addict before.

Yet it is also why it can be extremely hard to understand the phenomenon until you’ve experienced it.

Just sign up a twitter account now.

Merely looking at a stranger’s Twitter or Facebook feed isn’t interesting, because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day, though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it’s a novel.

Is it the same as witnessing a celebrity's life via gossip magazine and paparazzi?

the growing popularity of online awareness as a reaction to social isolation, the modern American disconnectedness

The mobile workforce requires people to travel more frequently for work, leaving friends and family behind, and members of the growing army of the self-employed often spend their days in solitude. Ambient intimacy becomes a way to “feel less alone,”

That's exactly what I said in my attempt to explain Twitter.

awareness tools aren’t as cognitively demanding as an e-mail message. E-mail is something you have to stop to open and assess. It’s personal; someone is asking for 100 percent of your attention. In contrast, ambient updates are all visible on one single page in a big row, and they’re not really directed at you. This makes them skimmable, like newspaper headlines; maybe you’ll read them all, maybe you’ll skip some.

IM is more like email. It just real-time email, someone still wants your attention. Microblogging/feed are different.

After following Seery’s Twitter stream for a year, I’m more knowledgeable about the details of her life than the lives of my two sisters in Canada, whom I talk to only once every month or so.

As mentioned above, we all know how @sugree's life is.

their sociality had truly exploded was in their “weak ties” — loose acquaintances, people they knew less well.

Sociologists have long found that “weak ties” greatly expand your ability to solve problems. For example, if you’re looking for a job and ask your friends, they won’t be much help; they’re too similar to you. Remote acquaintances will be much more useful, because they’re farther afield, yet still socially intimate enough to want to help you out.

I heard someone, probably @sunit, mentioned this phrase before. Need to check.

“I outsource my entire life,” she said. “I can solve any problem on Twitter in six minutes.”

The latest question I asked was "what is the Guyver Unit called in English?" I think answers came in 5 mins and from 3-4 people.

awareness tools like News Feed might be creating a whole new class of relationships that are nearly parasocial

“The information we subscribe to on a feed is not the same as in a deep social relationship,”

‘You’re being very nice and trying to help me, but though you feel like you know me, you don’t.’ ” Boyd sighed. “They can observe you, but it’s not the same as knowing you.”

Do you know me? or just suppose-to-know?

“These technologies allow you to be much more broadly friendly, but you just spread yourself much more thinly over many more people.”

a common plague of Facebook: the recent ex.

Yet Ahan knows that she cannot simply walk away from her online life, because the people she knows online won’t stop talking about her, or posting unflattering photos. She needs to stay on Facebook just to monitor what’s being said about her.

Never tries that with Thai friends and Hi5. I simply can't stand glittering profile page.

This is a common complaint I heard, particularly from people in their 20s who were in college when Facebook appeared and have never lived as adults without online awareness. For them, participation isn’t optional.

True but again, I don't use Hi5.

If you don’t dive in, other people will define who you are. So you constantly stream your pictures, your thoughts, your relationship status and what you’re doing — right now! — if only to ensure the virtual version of you is accurate, or at least the one you want to present to the world.

Definitely true. Everyone who read my blog has their own 'perception' of me. Some say I'm good, some say I'm too mean. Which one is the real me?

It brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where everybody knows your business.

Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early ’90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity — become someone new.

This is interesting. The previous books about internet might be already obsoleted. Anonymity can be canceled by the power of network?

‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’? On the Internet today, everybody knows you’re a dog!

Could I be a seal instead of dog? How about cat or rabbit?

“Can you imagine a Facebook for children in kindergarten, and they never lose touch with those kids for the rest of their lives? What’s that going to do to them?”

Once a while ago, I tweeted:

"Dad, how did you meet mom?"<br/> "Twitter"