On the growth of “ambient intimacy”
September 7th, 2008
By JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor
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Clive Thompson has a fascinating piece in the NYTimes Magazine today, Brave New World of Digital Intimacy, delving into the effects of news feeds, Twitter and other forms of online contact:
Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” 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. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online. In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for “microblogging”: posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing. The phenomenon is quite different from what we normally think of as blogging, because [these new updates are] far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered. One of the most popular new tools is Twitter, a Web site and messaging service that allows its two-million-plus users to broadcast to their friends haiku-length updates — limited to 140 characters, as brief as a mobile-phone text message — on what they’re doing. There are other services for reporting where you’re traveling (Dopplr) or for quickly tossing online a stream of the pictures, videos or Web sites you’re looking at (Tumblr). And there are even tools that give your location. When the new iPhone, with built-in tracking, was introduced in July, one million people began using Loopt, a piece of software that automatically tells all your friends exactly where you are.
Most of us over 30 have a hard time grasping it — I only recently joined the iPhone, SMS, and Twitter crowd myself — but those who do understand the paradox of ambient awareness:
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. […]
“It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley, told me. “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.” Yet it is also why it can be extremely hard to understand the phenomenon until you’ve experienced it. 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.
Fred Wilson, A VC, goes off in a different direction. He believes what we’re seeing is The “Feedization” Of The Web; these feeds are the next way we’ll navigate the online world:
This aggregation of information into a news feed has been adopted by many of the new web services that we get to see in our office every week. I’d say its the most common web UI/home page we see these days. Services like outside.in which launched with a more newspaper like front page a couple years ago have adopted the feed UI as well. […]
The web continues to grow and browsing is getting less and less efficient. Search was the first solution to that problem and it’s a huge part of the web experience now. Feeds are the second solution to that problem and I believe they will be an equally big part of the web experience.
RELATED: Xeni Jardin reminds us that Thompson has visited this topic before, last year in Wired.
This entry was posted on Sunday, September 7th, 2008 at 11:07 pm and is filed under Psychology, Internet, Storytelling, Popular Culture, Society, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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