First off, many apologies for slacking on my blog pimping but it’s the first week back to work/school and that’s always a serious drain on my energy. So I apologize for the two posts a week thing, but I will try to make them substantive. Keep checking back though. I appreciate the readership (all 25-100 of you).
The NY Times Magazine this week includes an extended piece by Clive Thompson called “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy,” in which he explores the burgeoning world of online “ambient awareness,” the chief tool being Twitter. If you don’t already know, Twitter is basically a microblogging service which can really be best compared to the status updates on Facebook. On Twitter, you detail what you are doing and can read what your friends are doing as well. If it were up to me, I would only have one status: “Doing hoodrat stuff with my friends.” But that’s neither here nor there.
For people who are keeping track of the second age of the Internet (aka Web 2.0), the sociality of the Internet is quite quickly taking the mantel of importance away from “information” and “knowledge” which have of course dominated the discourse of the Internet for the past 10 or so years. Facebook, MySpace, and even YouTube are all deemed examples of “social media.” I have a couple of issues with this category since I think “media” is always social. It never hasn’t been social. But I do understand where this is coming from. The Web now plays host to a lot more overt forms of sociality than before; and moreover the most recent explosion of Twitter announces a new social rubric, a new mode of sociality, one which I believe to exist “below” the individual, perhaps in a “subindividual” form.
The philosopher Martin Heidegger, whom I’ve mentioned before on this blog, is responsible for writing one of the most influential books in 20th century Western philosophy–Being and Time. In it, he describes a concept he calls mit-sein, which roughly translates to “being-with.” What is important about this concept for Heidegger is that human existence always entails a “with.” There is no such thing as existence on its own, fully autonomous. Existence is always co-existence, at least for humans. The philosophical project for Heidegger was a critique of the categories of Western philosophy that had been handed down from the Enlightenment, the most broad-ranging and extant being the “individual.” By arguing that human existence always entailed a “being-with,” Heidegger was pulling back the wool placed over the West regarding the primary sociality of humans, not just in the realm of action but of Being.
Thompson’s article goes into what some social scientists have called “ambient awareness,” which in my mind can be fruitfully understood through Heidegger’s mit-sein. Here, Thompson:
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. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online. In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for “microblogging”: posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing. The phenomenon is quite different from what we normally think of as blogging, because a blog post is usually a written piece, sometimes quite long: a statement of opinion, a story, an analysis. But these new updates are something different. They’re far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered. One of the most popular new tools is Twitter, a Web site and messaging service that allows its two-million-plus users to broadcast to their friends haiku-length updates — limited to 140 characters, as brief as a mobile-phone text message — on what they’re doing.
Now the question that Thompson is attempting to answer for the readership of the Times is: Why would anyone want to know the minute details of someone else’s life? As he himself admits regarding his own initial uneasiness to the adoption of Twitter into his everyday life, one begins to enjoy it, even in spite of his or her “rational” misgivings. What I mean by that is that we know we are not supposed to know each other’s private lives. That is, we are not supposed to stare and also we are all supposed to set up the fence between public and private. But more and more, we see that this is not only a tenuous divide, but an artificial one.
This is the paradox of ambient awareness. 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. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating.
What explains the urge to know but not ask? Or better yet, what explains the need for others to know, but not to tell? Thompson explains:
The Japanese sociologist Mizuko Ito first noticed it with mobile phones: lovers who were working in different cities would send text messages back and forth all night — tiny updates like “enjoying a glass of wine now” or “watching TV while lying on the couch.” They were doing it partly because talking for hours on mobile phones isn’t very comfortable (or affordable). But they also discovered that the little Ping-Ponging messages felt even more intimate than a phone call.
This is what I consider to be the most crucial and interesting portion of Thompson’s article, in spite of the relatively hasty fashion that he moves onto other, well-trodden areas of sociality such as the sociological concept of “weak ties,” which has been covered by even square media scholars that are primarily sociologists. Rather, I think the mention of Ito’s research into co-presence adheres more to the true theme of Thompson’s inquiry. By veering off into a traditional sociological line of inquiry, he misses what I take to the be a radical component of all of this–digital intimacy is no longer one-to-one, it is always multiple.
I don’t want to make the claim that perhaps intimacy has always been multiple because that would be another topic of study in itself (though I tend to agree), but what is absolutely true about Twitter is that its appeal comes from its “aggregate” nature. We can compare Instant Messaging with Twitter. Instant messaging is quite obviously an attempt to copy spoken conversations between individuals. Even the aesthetic nature of its interface is demonstrative of this. You have identifying buddy icons that represent who you are. Your screen name also serves this function. In short, instant messaging is a digital remake of an analog process, namely human speech. What I think is truly impressive about the Twitter is it takes communication into a “field” or “milieu.” And to be fair, Thompson is hip to this:
“It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley, told me. “No message is the single-most-important message. It’s sort of like when you’re sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.” Yet it is also why it can be extremely hard to understand the phenomenon until you’ve experienced it. Merely looking at a stranger’s Twitter or Facebook feed isn’t interesting, because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day, though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it’s a novel.
In spite of the fact that I think Thompson’s use of novelistic metaphors is absoutely wrong, I think that the Yahoo guy is absolutely right. We don’t communicate in contained messages anymore but in broad, indirect fields of information. And maybe this adds to Heidegger’s intial move towards the notion of co-existence, which moved the study of Being beyond the singular, autonomous individual; and today it may be better understood as existence-beneath-the-individual.
