1 post tagged “facebook”
Click the image for this excellent article on the "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy"
Clive Thompson (blog is here) wrote a probing and thoughtful piece in last Sunday's NYT Magazine on the concept of ambient awareness, which essentially describes a feeling of awareness that's fostered by microblogging tools like Twitter updates and Facebook news feeds; as your friends and contacts on sites publish little updates about what they are up to, you become "ambiently aware" of them.
The article quotes someone as saying this kind of awareness increases closeness with people, but also quoted on of the founders of Flickr as stating that she had seen a friend's child grow from birth to a year old without having visited the child. I certainly fall on that side of things and think ambient awareness increases distance, rather than closeness, by making it seem ok not to keep up with people. If you are only keeping up with their news feed or twitter, I don't think you are really keeping up, and as our number of online connections or friends increases (I just cracked my 1500th Facebook friend today), I think the distinction between who are your close friends, e.g. worthy of regular phone calls or even emails, and who are just your cyber circle of disembodied folks you kinda keep up with and kinda ignore, can blur.
The article also didn't really touch on one aspect of this that I find to be one of the most compelling points about modern online culture - the blog & Facebook generation tends to publish an idealized version of itself on the internet. Certainly, the extreme example of this is in the dating specific sites. How many people do you know who have experimented with online dating only to go on dates and say, "Yeah, [s]he didn't really look like his/her pictures." Almost everyone I know who's done the cyber dating thing can attest to this. Also, those people that I consider close and really trust, I want to share the good and the bad of my life with them on the deepest of levels; I think this is what keeps us human and makes us vital to each other's survival and, hopefully, triumph over adversity of all sorts. Granted, this has something to do with my own personality (I've never been accused of being private or less-than-blunt), but still, the all is rosy picture that's painted by this ambient awareness, to me, creates a false world that can make the downtrodden feel emotionally isolated, if they get too caught up in the cyber world, which many people do. To be fair, the article did touch upon manicuring of one's cyber persona through de-tagging unflattering Facebook photos, but I think I'm referring to something larger and deeper in scope.
A related tie in is that one can feel donwright animosity towards others on these feeds. It's easy to perceive people as boastful and arrogant if they are always putting their latest and greatest accomplishments online. Further, it's easy to simply get annoyed with people. For example, I am not in New York City right now, and I did my best to let everyone I'm in contact with in NYC know that, yet I still get a deluge of Facebook invitations to parties in NYC. A small deal, to be sure, but it certainly highlights how this disembodied medium makes it easy for people to just publish their agenda thoughtlessly, without real conmsideration of what others are up to and why. I'd hate to see that kind of behavior predominate further as more and more people whose lives are tied up daily in the post-Facebook world come of age.
While I love Facebook, Yelp, Blogging, Online News, and Message Boards, there is some kind of palpable downside to this notion of ambient awareness, for me at least. Perhaps I need to manicure my Facebook page and delet some fools! ;-) But then, they'd hate forever and consider me a jerk... onward it folds.
