Ambient Intimacy - Deva's Thoughts

Reading Response - Clive Thompson on Ambient Intimacy

This article outlines Facebook's rise from an idea that Zuckerberg had - to what the article deems the de facto public commons:
"Facebook became the de facto public commons — the way students found out what everyone around them was like and what he or she was doing."
Noticing that Facebook required too much browsing to keep updated on friends status Zuckerberg introduced the news feed which at first caused panic. Users were afraid that Facebook would become the big brother of the internet - Zuckerberg was suprised and added a privacy function but suspected that quickly people would realize they liked the news feed feature. And he was correct - after the initial response people found that they enjoyed using the omnipresent info at their fingerprints.
They had felt
""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."

The rise of online networking is a response to social isolation that Robert Putnam identifies in Bowling Alone. As we have become increasingly isolated with the rise of industrialism - post-industrialism - with nuclear familys and laptops etc. the individual begins to see themselves as seperate from their community ---
---"This is 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."
At first sites like Twitter and Facebook seem to give an overwhelming amount of trivial information - but this information is actually connecting people. Unlike emails these small updates do not require 100% of your attention and thus you can pursue them - forming loose but important social networks. Knowing that your teacher or your 'friend' across the world is sick - you might extend yourself in a way that has became impossible without knowing this information.
Dunbar an anthropologist is famous for saying that 150 is the top number of contacts humans can have and still know who they are. But this number is increasing - sort of. The number of loose ties is increasing but your closest friends does not necessarily change. This helps people solve problems - I know this personally I needed to get to an appointment and my phone was dead as well as my car. I changed my facebook status to need a ride ASAP - within 30 seconds I was instant messaged by a former member of the debate team and given a ride to my appointment. These connections are making clear the potential of joining with social networks to get things done - while the most successful have always known this - it is becoming undeniable in the internet age. Everyone is only 6 clicks, 6 friends, 6 twitters away from you.
But not all is cheery - while increased loose networks can help solve problems it can also cause a loss of intimate relationships - due to 'parasocial' relationships. We become more involved in fictional TV Show characters or Celebrities than with people in our own lives. We get more tied into our weekly TV shows than our friends - but this is why the internet to me offers exciting possibilities that TV did not. TV was not interactive - it was harder to 'be the media' but now its all a click away - if we engage our creativity we can form networks of our own that encourage creativity and the causes we care about.
So it appears we are not entering an unknown world where we know everyone's business but instead returning to small town lifestyle - you cant hide anything - and that might not be so bad. We are going to have to start caring about people for who they truly are - who we all truly are. A little bad, A little good, A lot of human - The constant updating - CyborgDeva is tying her shoes, doing her homework, walking through a door way is what Thompson refers to as a highly philosophical questioning. I am reminded of practices taught in a book about the 1970's Shaman/Cultural Guru/Lucid Dreamer Carlos Castenada that said one practice to become awake in life - and in dreams was to write down what you thought every time you walked through a door way. This causes a sense of realizing what you are doing - not just walking through life on robotic autopilot but really wondering- what am I doing?
For all the cynics out there I strongly reccomend you read this article - it raised some important questions for me, and as the article implies - perhaps what we are realizing in the increased anonymity of the internet is not a loss of identity but a much stronger self-awareness.