FOOT: I'm So Totally, Digitally Close To You

While I was reading this article, I found myself agreeing with most of what the author had to say. It made me think about how often I have multiple tabs open in the background, almost perpetually having Facebook open. I like how the author called it ambient intimacy. I feel that it is an appropriate term for it. I feel closer to my friends because of the technology that I use (though I only really use Facebook). Yet, at the same time, I’m skimming and scanning my news feed and like the author said “reading the headlines.”

It made me remember when there was no such thing as a news feed. I remember when I first logged in and saw the new addition to the website and I think I joined that group that was anti-news feed. Yet, I feel that now I have grown to like the news feed because I can be more connected to friends that I am not super geographically close to. This has helped a ton with keeping in contact with friends at different colleges or friends studying abroad.

One part of the article that really stood out to me was this quote that I found on Page 2:

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. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

It really is like a pointillist painting; each update is a dot and when you combine all those dots together, its the online digital "painting" of life.