Foot - So Totally, Digitally Close to You

Two things stood out to me in this article: 1) we are more connected now then we have ever been, and 2) we are losing our privacy and worries about privacy.

So Totally, Digitally Close to You by Clive Thompson was interesting and a certain idea really stood out to me, "they would just log into Facebook, and News Feed would appear: a single page that — like a social gazette from the 18th century" (Thomspon, ¶ 3). I love this idea that our social networks are a modernized variation of a "social gazette from the 18th century". Some people are against technology because they believe it separates people, and I am guilty of feeling this way too, but thinking of social networks in this way, it makes me realize how absolutely connected we really are.

Further into the article Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of Maryland explains that social networking is, "just like living in a village, where it’s actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already,” Tufekci said. “The current generation is never unconnected. They’re never losing touch with their friends. So we’re going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that’s very new. It’s just the 20th century.” (Tufekci ¶ 40). But is living in this virtual "village" where every tid bit about our friends, family, co-workers, that kid we met at the bar, etc. is instantly available, slowly causing us to become immune to any worries about privacy?

The issue of privacy is further discussed in the article when Thompson describes how iPhones introduced a built-in tracking device called Loopt. This, "piece of software...automatically tells all your friends exactly where you are" (Thompson, ¶ 10). One million people began using Loopt...one million people! In the article Mark Zuckerberg describes the initial outrage that surrounded the introduction of News Feed, but soon, "Users’ worries about their privacy seemed to vanish within days, boiled away by their excitement at being so much more connected to their friends. (Very few people stopped using Facebook, and most people kept on publishing most of their information through News Feed)" ( Zuckerberg ¶ 7). The constant information provided to us through News Feed and other social networks or technologies has hardened us to the idea of privacy. And we are quickly becoming addicted to "ambient awareness" (Thompson ¶ 10).

Ambient awareness is the incessant need to have information. This ambient awareness - Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks - is either bringing us back to a social closeness previously only found in small towns or it is turning us into a society hungry for an information fix and sacrificing our privacy to fulfill our ravenous appetite. It will be interesting to see where technology and social networking will take us in the future.

I found this article, Social networking through the ages by Stephen Fry, and it was a pretty interesting read about social networking 15 or 20 yrs ago.