Becoming Digitally Intimate

Social networking has become such a big thing now a days, from the outdated Hi5 to Facebook and Twitter, people are constantly online just browsing, searching and digging about each other. I’m also guilty of doing this of course, and as I constantly browse and read online about the latest on Internet, I begin to realize how much of a phenomenon this has become. Logging onto Facebook is almost the same as poking your head into someone’s room to see how they’re doing on a daily basis. 

Social scientists call this “ambient awareness”, the need to be physically near someone and pick up on their mood through the little things they do, body language, sighs, comments. I personally love to do this, I love to observe people and human nature, there is so much you can learn from someone by just watching them, the little things they do, their routine. But I also believe this has a great downside, this constant “watching” can become addictive when you’re online and it begins to pull you away from reality.

I read an interesting article last night about how Facebook got started in the Harvard campus a few years ago. It stated that people over the age of 30 could just find it absurd to describe their daily activities in detail on a daily basis, as well as follow others, but then again, most of the people I know (including myself) on these networks, they are all over 30! It has become a new routine in our lives, a break in the day to log on to the rhythms of our friends in a way we never have before. Read the rest of this entry »