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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 ESP," as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

ad hoc, self-organizing socializing.

The Japanese sociologist Mizuko Ito first noticed it with mobile phones: lovers who were working in different cities would send text messages back and forth all night

You could also regard the growing popularity of online awareness as a reaction to social isolation, the modern American disconnectedness that Robert Putnam explored in his book "Bowling Alone."

"Things like Twitter have actually given me a much bigger social circle. I know more about more people than ever before."

Online awareness inevitably leads to a curious question: What sort of relationships are these? What does it mean to have hundreds of "friends" on Facebook? What kind of friends are they, anyway?

Dunbar noticed that ape groups tended to top out at 55 members. Since human brains were proportionally bigger, Dunbar figured that our maximum number of social connections would be similarly larger: about 150 on average

where their sociality had truly exploded was in their "weak ties"

"I outsource my entire life," she said. "I can solve any problem on Twitter in six minutes."

She also keeps a secondary Twitter account that is private and only for a much smaller circle of close friends and family — "My little secret," she said. It is a strategy many people told me they used: one account for their weak ties, one for their deeper relationships.)

Psychologists have long known that people can engage in "parasocial" relationships with fictional characters, like those on TV shows or in books, or with remote celebrities we read about in magazines. Parasocial relationships can use up some of the emotional space in our Dunbar number, crowding out real-life people.

Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society who has studied social media for 10 years, published a paper this spring arguing that awareness tools like News Feed might be creating a whole new class of relationships that are nearly parasocial — peripheral people in our network whose intimate details we follow closely online, even while they, like Angelina Jolie, are basically unaware we exist.

"These technologies allow you to be much more broadly friendly, but you just spread yourself much more thinly over many more people."

She needs to stay on Facebook just to monitor what's being said about her. This is a common complaint I heard, particularly from people in their 20s who were in college when Facebook appeared and have never lived as adults without online awareness. For them, participation isn't optional. If you don't dive in, other people will define who you are.

"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."

Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor — a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem. Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early '90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity — become someone new.

"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.

"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."

Young people today are already developing an attitude toward their privacy that is simultaneously vigilant and laissez-faire. They curate their online personas as carefully as possible, knowing that everyone is watching — but they have also learned to shrug and accept the limits of what they can control.

Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you're feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It's like the Greek dictum to "know thyself," or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness.

Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is commitment to others.

If I do not love the world — if I do not love life — if I do not love people — I cannot enter into dialogue.

dialogue cannot exist without humility.

Dialogue further requires an intense faith in humankind, faith in their power to make and remake, to create and re-create, faith in their vocation to be more fully human

the “dialogical man” believes in others even before he meets them face to face.

Founding itself upon love, humility, and faith, dialogue becomes a horizontal relationship of which mutual trust between the dialoguers is the logical consequence.

naming of the world

Whereas faith in humankind is an a priori requirement for dialogue, trust is established by dialogue.

Nor yet can dialogue exist without hope. Hope is rooted in men’s incompletion, from which they move out in constant search

critical thinking — thinking which discerns an indivisible solidarity between the world and the people and admits of no dichotomy between them — thinking which perceives reality as process, as transformation, rather than as a static entity — thinking which does not separate itself from action, but constantly immerses itself in temporality without fear of the risks involved.

We must never merely discourse on the present situation, must never provide the people with programs which have little or nothing to do with their own preoccupations, doubts, hopes, and fears — programs which at times in fact increase the fears of the oppressed consciousness. It is not our role to speak to the people about our own view of the world, nor to attempt to impose that view on them, but rather to dialogue with the people about their view and ours. We must realize that their view of the world, manifested variously in their action, reflects their situation in the world. Educational and political action which is not critically aware of this situation runs the risk either of “banking” or of preaching in the desert.

Often, educators and politicians speak and are not understood because their language is not attuned to the concrete situation of the people they address. Accordingly their talk is just alienated and alienating rhetoric.

he dialogue of education as the practice of freedom

oncept of a generative theme

t is as transforming and creative beings that humans, in their permanent relations with reality, produce not only material goods — tangible objects — but also social institutions, ideas, and concepts

Generative themes can be located in concentric circles, moving from the general to the particular.

I consider the fundamental theme of our epoch to be that of domination — which implies its opposite, the theme of liberation, as the objective to be achieved.

For example, underdevelopment, which cannot be understood apart from the relationship of dependency, represents a limit-situation characteristic of societies of the Third World.

I must re-emphasize that the generative theme cannot be found in people, divorced from reality; nor yet in reality, divorced from people; much less in “no man’s land.” It can only be apprehended in the human-world relationship.

For precisely this reason, the methodology proposed requires that the investigators and the people (who would normally be considered objects of that investigation) should act as co-investigators.

Actually, themes exist in people in their relations with the world, with reference to concrete facts.

We must realize that the aspirations, the motives, and the objectives implicit in the meaningful thematics are human aspirations, motives, and objectives.

a common striving towards awareness of reality and towards self-awareness,

As a process of search, of knowledge, and thus of creation, it requires the investigators to discover the interpenetration of problems, in the linking of meaningful themes.

the comprehension of total reality

Thus, the process of searching for the meaningful thematics should include a concern for the links between themes, a concern to pose these themes as problems, and a concern for their historical-cultural context.

Just as the educator may not elaborate a program to present to the people, neither may the investigator elaborate “itineraries” for researching the thematic universe, starting from points which he has predetermined.

That is, they must consist of communication and of the common experience of a reality perceived in the complexity of its constant “becoming.”

Human beings are because they are in a situation. And they will be more the more they not only critically reflect upon their existence but critically act upon it.

One of these basic themes (and one which I consider central and indispensable) is the anthropological concept of culture. Whether men and women are peasants or urban workers, learning to read or enrolled in a post-literacy program, the starting point of their search to know more (in the instrumental meaning of the term) is the debate of the concept. As they discuss the world of culture, they express their level of awareness of reality in which various themes are implicit. Their discussion touches upon other aspects of reality which comes to be perceived in an increasingly critical manner These aspects in turn involve many other themes.

I am more and more convinced that true revolutionaries must perceive the revolution, because of its creative and liberating nature, as an act of love

This affirmation contains an entire dialogical theory of how to construct the program content of education, which cannot he elaborated according to what the educator thinks best for the students.