Sent to you by nigel via Google Reader:
Today, the New York Times Magazine is publishing an article I wrote about "ambient awareness" -- the way that micro-updating tools like Twitter and Facebook give us a constant, floating sense of what everyone we know is doing, all the time. The piece is online free at the Times' site, and I've put a copy below for archival purposes too.
That graphic above is a snippet from Peter Cho's wonderful illustrations that accompany the piece. Cho did a lovely job of taking a pretty amorphous concept and turning it into evocative imagery!
Here we go:
I'm So Totally, Digitally Close To You How News Feed, Twitter and other forms of incessant online contact have created a brave new world of ambient intimacy.On Sept. 5, 2006, Mark Zuckerberg changed the way that Facebook worked, and in the process he inspired a revolt.
Zuckerberg, a doe-eyed 24-year-old C.E.O., founded Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard two years earlier, and the site quickly amassed nine million users. By 2006, students were posting heaps of personal details onto their Facebook pages, including lists of their favorite TV shows, whether they were dating (and whom), what music they had in rotation and the various ad hoc "groups" they had joined (like "Sex and the City" Lovers). All day long, they'd post "status" notes explaining their moods -- "hating Monday," "skipping class b/c i'm hung over." After each party, they'd stagger home to the dorm and upload pictures of the soused revelry, and spend the morning after commenting on how wasted everybody looked. Facebook became the de facto public commons -- the way students found out what everyone around them was like and what he or she was doing.
But Zuckerberg knew Facebook had one major problem: It required a lot of active surfing on the part of its users. Sure, every day your Facebook friends would update their profiles with some new tidbits; it might even be something particularly juicy, like changing their relationship status to "single" when they got dumped. But unless you visited each friend's page every day, it might be days or weeks before you noticed the news, or you might miss it entirely. Browsing Facebook was like constantly poking your head into someone's room to see how she was doing. It took work and forethought. In a sense, this gave Facebook an inherent, built-in level of privacy, simply because if you had 200 friends on the site -- a fairly typical number -- there weren't enough hours in the day to keep tabs on every friend all the time.
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