life online

This NYT Magazine article about “digital intimacy” is long, but fascinating.

I was particularly interested in what they have to say about Twitter and my favorite part of Facebook, the status updates.

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, 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.

I don’t Twitter yet, but I do update my Facebook status frequently and enjoy reading the minutia of my friends’ lives.

Of course, many of my friends are writers so their updates are often carefully crafted, which makes them even more fun, but it’s even more than that. As the NYT describes it:

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.

A pointillist painting. What a wonderful description. And not only do the updates give me a sense of individuals’ lives, but they give me a sense of the whole world, buzzing along one little task and emotion at a time.

I haven’t given up face time for Facebook but frankly, I have more good friends across the country than across my city and if this is how I can stay connected to their lives, it will have to do. And it’s doing pretty well.

In a somewhat related story, this DMN story offers suggestions on how to focus in the multitasking hell in which we all live and work. One suggestion I particularly like is turning your back on your computer when someone is talking to you. I need to do that when I’m on the telephone.

In fact, I seem to have lost my headset and that might be a good thing, since I use it to keep my hands free while I’m on the phone, which means I can screw around on the computer. I’ll need to find it to do phone interviews, but it only allows me to be distracted when I’m not taking notes.

I did a speech last night to a very nice sorority alumni group and one woman told me about a trip to California she took recently. She noticed that there, people have become much more polite and restrained about using cell phones than they are here in Dallas. Evidently, Californians have learned better than to use their cell phones in restaurants. Nice.