1. Ambient intimacy

    Here’s a quick quote from a great NYT article on social media, and the rise of feeds, facebook, status messages and twitter.

    You could also regard the growing popularity of online awareness as a reaction to social isolation, the modern American disconnectedness that Robert Putnam explored in his book “Bowling Alone.” The mobile workforce requires people to travel more frequently for work, leaving friends and family behind, and members of the growing army of the self-employed often spend their days in solitude. Ambient intimacy becomes a way to “feel less alone,” as more than one Facebook and Twitter user told me.

    Interesting that the bain of that liberal luddite class — those computers that would turn us into individualist morally bankrupt zombies and the cell phones that would tether us to each other forever more — have somehow helped us become more intimate with each other. Even as our traditional institutions like the Lions or the church group dissolve before our eyes, new, distributed structures are being built in fits and starts; in 160 characters or less.

    But by making more online friends, are we taking time from our real relationships?

    As I interviewed some of the most aggressively social people online — people who follow hundreds or even thousands of others — it became clear that the picture was a little more complex than this question would suggest. Many maintained that their circle of true intimates, their very close friends and family, had not become bigger. Constant online contact had made those ties immeasurably richer, but it hadn’t actually increased the number of them; deep relationships are still predicated on face time, and there are only so many hours in the day for that….

    …Psychologists have long known that people can engage in “parasocial” relationships with fictional characters, like those on TV shows or in books, or with remote celebrities we read about in magazines. Parasocial relationships can use up some of the emotional space in our Dunbar number, crowding out real-life people.

Notes