[ExI] Facebook is freaking me out

[Kaj Sotala]

On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 2:28 AM, Emlyn <emlynoregan at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm sure I was coming to a point, but someone wants me to sign up to
> twitter. Ooh, shiny!

There was a really interesting article about the mental and social
impact of both Twitter and Facebook in the NYT recently, available at
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html .

Excerpt:

"Each day, Haley logged on to his account, and his friends' updates
would appear as a long page of one- or two-line notes. He would check
and recheck the account several times a day, or even several times an
hour. The updates were indeed pretty banal. One friend would post
about starting to feel sick; one posted random thoughts like "I really
hate it when people clip their nails on the bus"; another Twittered
whenever she made a sandwich - and she made a sandwich every day. Each
so-called tweet was so brief as to be virtually meaningless.

But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he
was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends' lives in a way he
never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he
could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the
instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were
heading into hellish days at work or when they'd scored a big success.
Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort
of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the
middle of each day.

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, like thousands of dots making a
pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the
real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the
sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like "a
type of E.S.P.," as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension
floating over everyday life."