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Saved by 1 people (0 private), first by anonymouse user on 2008-09-05


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n’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 intrig

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Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.”

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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

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They’re far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered

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The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme — the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world

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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

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but the idea of using communication tools as a form of “co-presence” has been around for a while.

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Mizuko Ito

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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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on 2008-09-05 by bmevans

Ito's work looking at "microblogging" of sorts between couples on cell phones.

But it’s easy to tweet all the time, to post pictures of what I’m doing, to keep social relations up.

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on 2008-09-05 by bmevans

Benefit of twitter: "can keep social relations up" and maintain a "much bigger social circle"

Things like Twitter have actually given me a much bigger social circle.

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n 1998, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar argued that each human has a hard-wired upper limit on the number of people he or she can personally know at one time

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about 150

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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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on 2008-09-05 by bmevans

Good question!

Many maintained that their circle of true intimates, their very close friends and family, had not become bigger

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But where their sociality had truly exploded was in their “weak ties” — loose acquaintances, people they knew less well.

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My overall Dunbar number is thus 301: Facebook (254) + Twitter (47), double what it would be without technology.

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Sociologists have long found that “weak ties” greatly expand your ability to solve problems.

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one account for their weak ties, one for their deeper relationships

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awareness tools like News Feed might be creating a whole new class of relationships that are nearly parasocial

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a culture of people who know much more about themselves

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