"I'm So Totally, Digitally Close to You" Clive Thompson

SSSssooooooooo much of this article was scary true! The best way for me to talk about this really in depth discussion is to point out quotes.

"Browsing Facebook was like constantly poking your head into someone's head into someone's room to see how she was doing." (para 2) This is so impeccably true. Before Facebook's popularity skyrocketed it was fairly difficult to find more about someone unless you had access to their page.

"He [Zuckerberg] developed something he called News Feed, a built-in service that would actively broadcast changes in a user's page to every one of his or her friends." (para 3) I remember this so clearly. Back to my senior year of high school my best friend John was trying to get me to get a Facebook account and he said "Syd... it's Myspace creeping made easy!!!!" However, now it is fairly simple to block or prohibit certain News Feeds post with the help of security settings, or simply choosing not to put it up. This leads to my next quote.

"The first was to add a privacy setting feature to News Feed, letting users decide what kind of information went out. But the second decision was to leave News Feed otherwise intact. He suspected that once people tried it and got over their shock, they'd like it. "(para 6) He was totally right. Today, people fully expect the consequence of putting a change to their Facebook page.

As the next section was continuing to Twitter, I am a little less knowledgeable. I hate Twitter. I have posted one Twitter post in my life, and I just don't see the point in it at all. But I was impressed by an interview that the author had with a 39-year old man that decided to get an account. The more he looked at updates he began to see more and more of a pattern in his friend's everyday lives. "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' live, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting." (para 15)

"Many maintained that their circle of true intimates, their very close friends and family, had not become bigger. Constant online contact has made those tides immeasurably richer, but it hadn't actually increased the number of them; deep relationships are still predicted on face time, and there are only so many hours in the day for that." (para 28) I'm not sure how I feel about this quote. I completely agree with the fact that deep relationships will still have face time. I talk to my best friend who lived 4 hours away from me when Kent State is in session, and it is guaranteed that when I come home we go out to eat, hang out or some type of get together. The part that I have the most problems with is that fact that I lean on the side that online relationships can increase with online activity. When my mom signed up for a Facebook account the first thing she did was found her old friend from high school she hasn't spoken to in years.

"For them, [people in their 20s] participation isn't optional. If you don't dive in, other people will define who you are. So you constantly stream your pictures, your thoughts, your relationship status and what you are doing--right now!-- if only to ensure the virtual version of you is accurate..." (para 39) Parts of this section really frustrates me. Being published in 2008 this may have been true then, but now if you don't put up a lot of pictures, or statuses, or whatever else Facebook comes up with I don't feel defenseless against the virtual world. Now if I disappeared from Facebook all together my friends and family would be a tad concerned, but the fact that my activity is rather quiet does not define who I am.