I know as much as you want me to know, yet I know more than you allow me to know

Finished reading an article that was published in the International Herald Tribune titled "Web Ushers in Age of Ambient Intimacy," by Clive Thompson. In the article Thompson goes to describe impacts that internet social networking sites such as facebook and twitter are impacting peoples lives. It starts off with telling the story of facebooks 'news feed' that was started in 2006. The news feed takes all the updates that your friends have made to their page and organizes them into chronological order on the main page of your facebook account. This new feature has started to change the way people are seeing themselves and others. The news feed is like twitter, which is another social networking site that limits the number of words per update.

Even though the two operate in similar fashion's facebook allows way more in depth knowledge of others in terms of how they construct their identity through their info page in facebook, but allows more privacy since you have to approve who can see most of your information by becoming friends. While twitter really only lets you 'micro blog' about yourself as Thompson describes in the article. Micro blogging is small excerpts of text, while blogging usually entails longer written entries. Micro blogging from twitter and news feed from facebook are making social interactions much different than ever before. People have an 'ambient awareness' of those who are connected by social networking sites. Ambient awareness is described as where people overtime get a deeper sense of each other through these 'micro blogs' about themselves. This awareness has an impact on levels of intimacy that we can have with people.

Thompson notes that people feel that they are becoming more and sometimes less connected due to the usage of the sites. People are able to connect on much deeper levels and have access to way more knowledge about their close friends through social networking sites, but are people making more friends on that deeper level?. Thompson mentions the Dunbar number, which is the number of friends that people naturally constrain themselves to. For most people its around 150 people that you can keep in a relative tight loop. He shows that while people may be able to expand their Dunbar number exponentially, most people are still not connecting in deep emotional ways to these 'weak tie' friends.

Ambient intimacy can profoundly strengthen 'weak ties' or friends that you met but really wouldn't stay in touch with on a normal basis. Twitter and facebook allow people to stay in touch instantly. It also allows for a way to stay in touch without actually having to meet or speak necessarily to each other personally. This knowledge that almost anyone anywhere can lurk around our lives is changing people. This is directly related to our research into identity on the internet.

People are hyper aware of each other as the Thompson's article pointed out. This hyper awareness makes people extremely conscience of how we project ourselves on the internet. You make the identity that, can emphasize or down play different aspects of ourselves. Yet its neat to see that with twitter one can cross check the various constructed identities we make using sites like facebook. Twitter gives lets you see what people really are doing on a day to day bases and this can give a better reflection of someones life than what has been possible before when the individual constructed what they wanted to project about their 'real world' identity. Depending on how much information is posted on facebook and how often they use twitter. It will be interesting to watch as more social networking sites come about and how the structuring of these sites will allow different creative ways of interacting with more and more people across the globe.