Okay, SO Tara and I have been horrible at blogging the last few weeks, but we’ve both been rather busy moving. To be fair, I moved only from North Amherst to Hadley, about five miles away, and Tara moved from New York to London… Here is a picture of us hugging goodbye a few weeks ago. And, here are some random scattered thoughts and article excerpts about social interaction the internet and such things.
I read an interesting article a few days ago about digital intimacy, and it had a few new media terms I liked: microblogging (posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing, like Twitter) and ambient awareness.
“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.,” an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.”
But: “If you’re reading daily updates from hundreds of people about whom they’re dating and whether they’re happy, it might, some critics worry, spread your emotional energy too thin, leaving less for true intimate relationships.” It’s a long article, but I recommend reading all of it, very fascinating stuff.
I also just read an article in Hampshire’s student newspaper, the Climax, about so-called “Facebook celebrities” in the incoming class – those kids who, before school even starts, go and and friend every single person they can find. So when you meet someone you’ve friended on Facebook in person for the first time, do you pretend you don’t already know where they’re from, their favorite music, relationship status, and employment history? Is it taboo to ask about an interesting picture you saw of them on a vacation?
Facebook was the new thing when I first started college, and our generation is still navigating the social do’s and don’ts of how online information is used in real life interaction. But do you suppose, in a few years, there will be a more universal, unwritten social code about how we interface with such things? OR, maybe at some point ALL of our socializing will just be digital? This virtual reality cocoon is amazing technology, but it kind of freaks me out.
We joke casually nowadays about googling or stalking someone online, but in the age of social networking, digital intimacy, ambient information, and blogging, where is the line drawn between curiosity, obsession, and straightforward stalking?
-Molly
