Tweeter - Ambient Intimacy or Waste of Time?

This image was created by a site that lets you creat a visual image of your twitter network

Urban Dictionary defines ambient intimacy:

Internet ESP a side effect of social networking sites such as Twitter and the Facebook News Feed; increased awareness of your 'friends' and of your overall network; feeling of connection within loose social networks

You know your witnessing ambient intimacy when you sense that your sister's ex-boyfriend from middle school is writing a term paper 2000 miles away--from seeing his status update on your news feed.
Knowing the girl you have a crush is no longer fbo. And she is at the coffee shop - Ambient!
Looks like its a bad day status updates are :-( within the network.

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Ted Leung's blog post breaks down ambient intimacy
"the intimacy comes from the fact that I choose whose Twitter streams to subscribe to, and the fact that the content that people are putting in their Twitter streams tends toward the more persona"
"It seems to me that the ambience is largely a function of which modality you use to access your Twitter stream."

Twitter has no interface that it is housed in -from phone sms messages to twitters site - yet np real home in the way facebook has developed the idea of a home - similar to the home one creates in their senior highschool year book.
But is ambient intimacy all its cracked up to be? Courtney Haden thinks not, "
Which brings me to my biggest beef with Twitter, which is that my life may not be consequential enough to follow minute by minute online. I’m already on record as being opposed in principle to texting — you’ve got a telephone in your hand, dial it already! — so I’m not feeling the pull to start typing indifferently any more than I do already for this column once a week. Besides, if I’m indisposed to join the blogosphere, there’ll be even less room for me on a microblog. Thanks to Twitter, you can tell me when you’re having coffee or mowing the lawn or exfoliating. But I don’t want you to. Believe me, if I were that interested in knowing what you do every waking minute, you probably would have heard from me already."
Some church goers though are seeing ambient intimacy - through tweets - "as key to building the portable church is what some social commentators are now calling “ambient intimacy,” an enveloping social awareness of one’s social network. For believers, regular updates or prayer and praise requests can reverberate and contribute to faith dialogues. Depending on the content of the messages, this can ultimately extend and enrich the religious public sphere. For evangelicals and radical believers, such social small talk is given greater significance in efforts to achieve missional conquest, expiation of sin, and salvation. On the other hand, microblogging can contribute to internet radicalization of a malevolent kind, where we see microblogging and blogging of extremist networked believers, leading to Web 2.0 “cyber-herding” and an echo chamber of effect among fundamentalist religious ideologies."

Besides being useful for faith based operators - Tweets are teaching students about writing and communication - their limited format demands a new form of communicating by students -
Alternet posted an article by Chuck Tryon in favor of Tweeting it Up -
" nearly half of my tweets are replies, suggesting that the genre functions less as a broadcast and more as a conversation...one of the biggest misunderstandings of Twitter is the argument that the practice of writing in 140-character chunks suggests that we are thinking in the same bite-sized bits. Yes, Twitter sometimes requires me to engage in some linguistic cartwheels to distill something down to 140 characters, but arguably that's a sign of creativity and facility with language, not a decline in good grammar. In addition, this assumes that language -- what is written in a tweet, a blog post, or any text for that matter -- is identical to thought, a pretty reductive view of how thought and language interact."
"This potential use for Twitter became vividly clear for me when I attended the first of several local "Tweetups" here in Fayetteville, N.C., where I live and teach. The "Tweetup" brought together several locals who are interested in social media, where we could exchange ideas and discuss shared interests, many of which extended well beyond the computer screen. These online networks don't supplant existing communities. Instead, they provide a useful supplement to conversations that we're already having."

Check out a video on semantic webbing--click here. The future with a million clerks checking the connections through the webs - finding the connections through the seas of networks - the video explains more...

Ambient Intimacy Betwixt Networks

A fellow digital ethnographer kelz pointed me towards Ambient Skype. Skype is a web based video conferencing tool. Some users share intimate moments - even sleeping across the globe. As one response to Roo's blog posts this is a little Truman Show like -