A Brave, New World

In Clive Thompson's "A Brave New World of Digital Intimacy," he claims that our lives are becoming more and more public due to social media, and therefore we are making more connections and broadcasting our lives further. In an interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg, Zuckerburg tells Thompson that he introduced the News Feed so users wouldn't have to spend their whole day navigating profiles to see what their friends were up to; it would just appear in front of them. This just goes to show how short are attention spans are rapidly becoming, and that we don't want to take on more than just small bits of information at a time. The article defines ambient awareness as incessant contact with people; with Facebook, you can stay in almost constant, although probably not very detailed, contact with people you are connected with. The paradox of this type of awareness is that we "get to know" people without actually getting to know them in the traditional sense. Although we may be friends with them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter, we've never actually seen or spoke to them in real life. This can be both good and bad; it can help you connect with people you may have otherwise never known of, but then again it can restrict or take away from the relationships you have with people you meet on a day to day basis. An ambient update is a tiny, otherwise irrelevant update, such as "making a sandwich," or "I'm not feeling very well." When Thompson talks about social media being skimmable, he means it in a sense that we may read some of them, and we may skip some of them; we just skim over them as a whole, never really taking any of them into deep thought. This relates to the conversations we've had in class about literacy being able to read something as well as take it in and analyze it. Our "weak ties," as Thompson calls them, are people we're not really acquainted with, just connected via social media. Like I said above, this can help and hurt us; we've made these connections with people we otherwise never would have had contact with, which can be good, but these weak ties can take away from our strong ties, or our actual real life acquaintances. As Thompson says in his article, 20-something's feel pressured to stay on Facebook not so they can keep others updated and see what others are doing, but so they can monitor their online identity. This article defines literacy in the 21st century as being able to read in a traditional sense (a book) and in a modern sense (social media), but also being able to take in and interpret as well as analyze what you have read, not just skimming.