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Socially, we are more mobile than we have ever been before. But digitally, we are now more connected than we have been for a long time. No longer are geographic moves tearing our social ties apart. We now inhabit more than a physical space—we are also living in the Cloud.
When the web came around in the 90s, it was a place where, unconstrained by the reality of your meatspace life and largely anonymous, people could be anything they wanted to be. Fast forward almost twenty years and the web is now the place where the majority of us are most ourselves: Facebook accounts list our family members and friends from kindergarten to adulthood, our LinkedIn profiles list our work histories, our Twitter streams show everything we're doing, our Foursquare accounts show everywhere we're going—and so on.
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” Muriel Rukeyser asks rhetorically in her poem Käthe Kollwitz. “The world would split open.” If she's right, then everyday, women and men are splitting the world with their truths, one update at a time.
AMBIENT AWARENESS
Ambient awareness—that's what social scientists call the incessant contact we have with one another nowadays. As Clive Thompson described it in his piece for the New York Times magazine in 2008, ambient awareness is “very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye.”
The color of a friend's Gtalk status (green, yellow, red, gray) tells me how available they are that day. Their Twitter updates give me a blow-by-blow of what's going on. The music they're putting up on Blip.fm suggests their mood. Mixed media microblogs like Tumblr and social bookmarks (often fed right into their Facebook newsfeeds) let me know what they're looking at. Other status updates let me know how their day is starting, who they've started dating or broken up with in real time-- or at the very least, in time as real as the impulse that drives their action.
As a result, I know more about my friends now than I ever knew before.
“It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” says Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley. “No message is the single-most-important message. It’s sort of like when you’re sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.”
This constant connection has solved the problem of isolation as we go about our increasingly mobile lives, but it is giving rise to a new set of issues.
POKE ME: SOCIAL MEDIA AND NEW RELATIONSHIPS
“WHY ISN'T HE POKING ME?!” Cécile types in caps into the chat window in response to my greeting.
Cécile has just started seeing a man we'll call Andrei, who'd previously “poked” her every other day on Facebook (yes, she checked their poking history).
“I CAN SEE HE'S ONLINE BUT HE'S NOT SAYING ANYTHING TO ME!” she messages. She's going out of her mind.
Just then, my friend Marisa direct messages me on Twitter. She hasn't heard from her lover all day and his choice social network is showing he hadn't logged in there, either. Marisa e-mailed him twice during the course of the day, but she knows he hasn't opened either message thanks to one of those handy black-belt e-stalking tools that enable you to see when someone is accessing the e-mails you've sent.
“WHERE IS HE?” she screams when I conference both her and Cécile into a private TinyChat room for a cross-continental webcam-enabled pow-wow.
Marisa's imagination is running wild with images of her photographer paramour Brandon cavorting with scantily-clad models on the beach. Cécile is hysterically debating whether the lack of a poke constitutes a loss of interest in her new object of interest.
“I am so far beyond Xanax it's not even funny,” says Marisa with a sigh, lighting a cigarette. “I already took two. I'm still hysterical. If he doesn't message me by Tuesday, I'm going to cut up all the shoes he gave me—the ones I don't like—and throw them on his lawn.”
“That's brilliant,” I say, lighting my own cigarette. “I'll help you.”
“AV,” Cécile interjects. “What's up with Tristan? He just tweeted the weirdest thing.”
Tristan and I have the converse of usual “is that tweet
