Our ambient awarenesses

A few people sent over a link to an article in the New York Times' Sunday Magazine this week aptly titled "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy." (The online title is telling, too: "I'm So Totally, Digitally Close to You.")

The piece, which you've almost certainly read, speaks to the effect of web 2.0 products like Twitter (which I've never used) or Facebook's News Feed (which I'm still learning to appreciate) and status updates (which I hardly ever use but have no choice but to constantly imbibe) on the the way we interact with people online. These constant updates on the minutiae of the lives of our online social orbs leads to "incessant online contact" which social scientists call "ambient awareness."

(I'd like to interject here by noting that this week, seven separate Facebook status updates in my News Feed read something like this: "____ is contemplating her ambient awareness." Or, my favorite: "____ is updating his ambient social life.")

I found it interesting that a handful of people sent me this article. Clearly, they believe me to be a person with a robust online presence, and who thrives on ambient awareness. But in reading Clive Thompson's piece, I realized that as far as my ambient awareness goes, it's not nearly as all-encompassing as others'.

Let's review the 2.0 products I use most. This blog, in a way, is behind this time. Here I always write more than a few hundred characters, and I don't tell you what sandwich I just ate or how I feel in the morning. Believe it or not, I somewhat seriously consider the contents of each post, and I like to consider the blog a sort of compositional calisthenics for the writer in me. My other stalwart is Gchat, where I have actual e-conversations. Give-and-take is involved. I use Google Reader as well, but it's mainly just become a convenient replacement for the series of link-filled e-mails I sent before. Further, there's also a degree of give-and-take, as friends share their curated RSS feeds, too.

My fourth and last major 2.0 product is Facebook, which I use mostly to check my inbox (where I get full-fledged notes, comprised of actual sentences) and to peruse photographs posted by my close friends (many of whom now live across the country, or, in many cases, in other countries). But in my attempts to catch up on the lives of people I know well or actively want to get to know better, I am bombarded by the latest-and-not-greatest of what's going on in my other 800-odd (!) Facebook friends' lives.

Through status updates and my diarrheal News Feed, I know that the girl I was consistently annoyed by in middle school is still depressed, over ten years later. A friend's ex-girlfriend, whom I will likely never see again, just bought an iPhone. A man in my own romantic past "can't wait for Thursday night!!!!"

Even though I only ever update my status a handful of times each year, mostly to let people know I'm "in Brazil for the week," my News Feed still tells everyone who I've befriended and which parties I'm going to. And so, like the many people Thompson interviewed, I fall into this, even if passively. I, like you, have little choice but to spread myself further and thinner to more people than ever before. It's bad in the sense that I feel flooded with useless information about people I am pretty content to never see or hear of again in my life, but it's also become the natural evolution of human contact, as far as I can tell, among my increasingly kinetic, wired generation.

This brings me to a post I meant to write many times but never did. Through Google Analytics I have a good idea of my blog's readership. (Yes, I love checking stats. As Dan says, "Blog hits are good for the soul.") You know, I get the basics, like where readers are (no surprise: most are in New York and San Francisco) and what they read (which links get clicked on). For some time now, I've come to suspect that somebody I was once close to but have since fallen out of touch with reads this blog every day. I've considered writing and saying hi, in the hopes of returning our relationship to the give-and-take that I consider (considered?) significant, or real. After all, this person cares enough to catch up on my blog on a daily basis. But then I realized that we've both made a choice to relegate our relationship to the online realm. Because we've moved on, and having the choice to only take and not give—or to waver between giving, taking or both as we see fit, in other cases—is now not only one of many norms, but also a choice I want and need.