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We are no longer just consumers of content, we have become curators of it too.

“In the past, I may have used this time in the day to read newspapers, magazines or books. Now I have just substituted the same time with reading and sharing news online.”

“controlled serendipity,”

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.

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.” It can also lead to more real-life contact, because when one member of Haley’s group decides to go out to a bar or see a band and Twitters about his plans, the others see it, and some decide to drop by — ad hoc, self-organizing socializing. 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.

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.” The mobile workforce requires people to travel more frequently for work, leaving friends and family behind, and members of the growing army of the self-employed often spend their days in solitude. Ambient intimacy becomes a way to “feel less alone,” as more than one Facebook and Twitter user told me.

“Our goal is to offer the public interested in investigative journalism a tool where they can find experts’ opinions and experiences about the topic, documents, recommended books and articles as a source to consult, and constant updates on the activities and work being done in the investigative journalism field,”

“If you can control the pathways and means of finding information, you can extract rents from subsequent levels of producers,”

useful for would-be buyers

When information was recorded on a tangible medium—paper, film and so on—everything had only one correct place. With digital information the same item can be filed in several places at once, notes David Weinberger, the author of a book about taxonomy and the internet, “Everything Is Miscellaneous”. Digital metadata make things more complicated and simpler at the same time.