If you don’t “get” Facebook and Twitter, read this NY Times article September 8, 2008
Posted by jeremyliew in facebook, microblogging, social media, social networks, status, twitter.trackback
The NY Times is often considered the US newspaper of record, and it lives up to its reputation with an excellent article in today’s Sunday NY Times Magazine about the ambient awareness enabled by Facebook status updates, Twitter and other microblogging tools.
Even readers familiar with both popular microblogging tools and their history should read this article. High points:
Microblogging enables ambient awareness of your broad friendship group:
In essence, Facebook users didn’t think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?
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.
Ambient awareness comes not from any single tweet or status update, but from the aggregation of the data.
Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they’d scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.
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. 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. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.
“It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,” Haley went on to say. “I love that. I feel like I’m getting to something raw about my friends. It’s like I’ve got this heads-up display for them.” … 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.
“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.
Ambient awareness helps maintain “weak ties”. Sociological research has shown that a large network of weak ties is more likely to be helpful than a small network of strong ties when trying to do things like get a job, find a mate, and other socially tinged objectives
Many maintained that their circle of true intimates, their very close friends and family, had not become bigger. Constant online contact had made those ties immeasurably richer, but it hadn’t actually increased the number of them; deep relationships are still predicated on face time, and there are only so many hours in the day for that.
But where their sociality had truly exploded was in their “weak ties” — loose acquaintances, people they knew less well. It might be someone they met at a conference, or someone from high school who recently “friended” them on Facebook, or somebody from last year’s holiday party. In their pre-Internet lives, these sorts of acquaintances would have quickly faded from their attention. But when one of these far-flung people suddenly posts a personal note to your feed, it is essentially a reminder that they exist.
Microblogging, ambient awareness and maintaining weak ties has the sideeffect of making it impossible to move away and “reinvent yourself” as your past will always be with you.
This is the ultimate effect of the new awareness: It brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where everybody knows your business…
“It’s just like living in a village, where it’s actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already,” Tufekci said. “The current generation is never unconnected. They’re never losing touch with their friends. So we’re going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that’s very new. It’s just the 20th century.”…
“If anything, it’s identity-constraining now,” Tufekci told me. “You can’t play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on you. I had a student who posted that she was downloading some Pearl Jam, and someone wrote on her wall, ‘Oh, right, ha-ha — I know you, and you’re not into that.’ ” She laughed. “You know that old cartoon? ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’? On the Internet today, everybody knows you’re a dog! If you don’t want people to know you’re a dog, you’d better stay away from a keyboard.”
Again, read the whole thing.
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very solid – very timely post. thanks
Really insightful post!
Thanks for sharing!
Best.
alain
nice post, cheers
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This “ambient awareness” thing is a phenomenon that exists only in the bay area… the rest of the world still lives in a twitbook free world. Maybe this article is slightly out of touch with whats really going on.
And why would you want to “constrain your identity”? The ability to revinvent yourself is a great gift.
thanks for calling this article to my attention!
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The need to communicate and to stay connected to one another in what seems the most absurd fashions … have become the most powerful!
We are well aware of this
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This is a good layman’s explanation of the value of Twitter but I would say it’s lacking the countervailing discussion of the negative effects. The barrage of ADHD sound byte updates from a ton of people gives you a false sense of connectedness to your friends to the point where you don’t talk to them as much. I know of at least a few people who have quit the various social networking services to find an immediate flood of people calling them saying “how come you unfriended me?” The irony is that quitting the social networks restored the social-ness and put them back in touch with people.
Sean
“It’s just like living in a village, where it’s actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already,” …wellll, social communities and their profiles mostly are everything else than “truth”, everybody knows that and that makes least this part of the article a little bit of nonsense.
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what information do you get if you sean a magazine?
yes, yes, and yes except for the very end: as we articulate the spectrum between fully-private and fully-public with ever-more elaborate privacy settings (e.g. “who can see this picture?”), we’ll no longer have to steer clear of the keyboard to prevent the world from knowing that we’re a dog. in fact, we can be a dog in one world, a person in another, a furry in another, etc. i.e. we’ll have more mechanisms for and get better at creating boundaries between different expressions of ourselves, er identities. just like in offline life: you don’t tell your mom the same thing you tell your best friend. and online life will enable the same kinda differentiation. just ask younger people….
Is it a mirror, a lifeline or a noose, that is the question. When the social fatigue sets in, and it will, just tune out, turn off, drop out (for a while anyway).
Social media is just a tool. Twitter was invented exactly for one purpose: so people can constantly send “micro updates” to a group of followers. Nobody asked why. Why do we need to send micro updates? Or why do we need to receive micro updates? People started using Twitter and now these people are experiencing something entirely new.
Sorry, I still find other peoples lives completely boring. Why would I care about the details of your life?
Would you want to meet someone and hear about when they “crap”?
Same thing when I hear about their mood at 12:45 September 12th.
I set up an account, and maybe look at it once every two months.
As someone said in a marketing sale once and I’ll apply it to Facebook:
I take as a given that Twittering is a largely pointless exercise that seems best suited as an outlet for narcissists and input for stalkers. Having been both in my lifetime, I can admit that earlier versions of myself might have rapturously embraced it as liberating. I harbor no such illusions now.
I really don’t care what ANYONE is doing at 1:12am on Thursday night. Now, if you are using facebook to get laid, go for it…but I just find it a complete waste of time.
I propose that 24/7 masturbation is more productive.
Thank you Robert… the only one who makes sense on this page.
“Scientists noticed that their subjects had no initial attraction to crack cocaine, but once they started using it they realized it was a good way to keep their mind off real world issues and become complacent zombies.”
Is what I heard from this article.
Have you read “The Best of Times: A Life in California? It’s a blast!
That was the longest article I ever read about nothing. Robert is right on about Facebook: narcissists, stalkers and pointless. It gives a whole new meaning to the word “friend”. Sorry, but I ‘m not into giving complete strangers my personal information and without knowing if they’re Jack-the-Ripper or another Bundy asking them to be my “friend”. I’ll just stick to the old meaning of what a friend is. Oh, but in case you’re interested it’s almost 3:00am and I’m going to bed now.
[...] March 30, 2009 Posted by jeremyliew in facebook, twitter. trackback Last September the NY Times did a terrific job of explaining microblogging, including the key elements of Facebook and Twitter. However, one thing has always bothered me [...]