Brave New World of Digital Intimacy

In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for “microblogging”: posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing. 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. But these new updates are something different. They’re far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered. The New York Times says that social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” Full extended article here.