I'm So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Jamie Raskin on 17 Sep 11Sort of like a motion-sensor camera that only activates and records when there's a change in the environment...
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“Frankly, I don’t need to know or care that Billy broke up with Sally, and Ted has become friends with Steve.”
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When I spoke to him, Zuckerberg argued that News Feed is central to Facebook’s success. “Facebook has always tried to push the envelope,” he said.
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Users’ worries about their privacy seemed to vanish within days, boiled away by their excitement at being so much more connected to their friends
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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?
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“I really hate it when people clip their nails on the bus”
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The phenomenon is quite different from what we normally think of as blogging, because a blog post is usually a written piece, sometimes quite long: a statement of opinion, a story, an analysis.
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Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before.
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But they also discovered that the little Ping-Ponging messages felt even more intimate than a phone call.
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Ambient intimacy becomes a way to “feel less alone,” as more than one Facebook and Twitter user told me.
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“I have a rule,” she told me. “I either have to know who you are, or I have to know of you.”
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“Things like Twitter have actually given me a much bigger social circle. I know more about more people than ever before.”
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What sort of relationships are these? What does it mean to have hundreds of “friends” on Facebook? What kind of friends are they, anyway?
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This makes them skimmable, like newspaper headlines; maybe you’ll read them all, maybe you’ll skip so
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psychological studies have confirmed that human groupings naturally tail off at around 150 people: the “Dunbar number,” as it is known. Are people who use Facebook and Twitter increasing their Dunbar number, because they can so easily keep track of so many more people?
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This rapid growth of weak ties can be a very good thing. Sociologists have long found that “weak ties” greatly expand your ability to solve problems.
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Parasocial relationships can use up some of the emotional space in our Dunbar number, crowding out real-life people.
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the sheer ease of following her friends’ updates online has made her occasionally lazy about actually taking the time to visit them in person.
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a culture of people who know much more about themselves.
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Also maybe also a culture of narcissists. http://www.narcissismepidemic.com/aboutbook.html
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t’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter’s Web site
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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.