Thompson suggests that we can potentially get an outstanding benefit from ambient awareness. Digested steadily and with a modicum of perspective—tweets are not meant to be all-consuming—ambient awareness has the potential to make rich contributions to our relationships.
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.
I have three (and a half) beefs with Thompson’s otherwise provocative piece.
First, he never fully engages how much work it requires to keep up-to-speed with Twitter or Facebook’s Newsfeed. He makes a half-hearted sally, but doesn’t stab this problem square in the chest.
I asked Seery how she finds the time to follow so many people online. The math seemed daunting. After all, if her 1,000 online contacts each post just a couple of notes each a day, that’s several thousand little social pings to sift through daily.
Thompson ends up backing off from how “daunting” keeping up with Twitter could potentially be. Tweets are really like newspaper headlines, he argues, not emails or letters—the latter group would require full mental attention. The former can be skimmed. I don’t buy this argument. As Umberto Eco points out, life is lived in the interstices. It doesn’t matter how interstitial work feels, it’s still work. And it always adds up to a massive commitment of time, energy, and resources.
Point two: since it doesn’t cost you any money to tweet or update your Newsfeed, then maybe you think that money isn’t part of the ambient awareness equation. This would be a huge misjudgment.
Facebook already makes hundreds of millions of dollars with ads. Twitter is inevitably going to travel the same road. The work you’re doing on these platforms might be free to you, but it’s making the platforms piles of money. Instead of them having to spend capital on marketing research in order to divine precisely the best ways to reach you, you’re providing all the marketing information they’ll ever need—and voluntarily! It’s been said that watching television consitutes the work of watching. Shortly thereafter, it was rightly observed that reality television—and by inference, social networking—constitutes the work of being watched. (Bonus: I've been known to say that television is evil. I say this for fun, but also because it's pretty much true.) Anyway, to Facebook and Twitter and every other microblogging service out there, we're nothing more than tidy little nodes of marketing data dropping capital into their pockets.
My third beef is that Thompson doesn’t delve into the political dimension of ambient awareness. Howard Rheingold may have invented this discussion with Smart Mobs, but that doesn’t mean it has run its course. News that Barack Obama was going to announce his Vice Presidential nominee via text message raised this topic in the media just a couple of weeks ago. It feels odd and disconnected that Thompson didn’t at least give smart mobs a passing mention. (Disclosure: Rheingold was one of my professors at Stanford, though I read his book before I ever took his class.)
Lastly, my half beef (as it were). I don’t see nearly enough discussion in technology journalism over the ballooning costs involved in keeping up with the Jobses, and this article is yet another example. An iPhone may have come down in price, but it’s still a few hundred bucks, not to mention the monthly service payment topping $100. Even if you have standard cell service on a pedestrian Razr, texts cost extra—either individually or in higher service packages. Twitter and Facebook are free, but in order to tweet or change your Facebook handle (or comment on your friends’) with your mobile device of choice, you need to pony up the monies. And not everyone has that option.
It is hard to continue this last (half) beef without getting deeper into the numbers—which I simply don’t have. But I’d love to know how much the average consumer is spending on connectivity these days, and how much that amount has increased in recent years.
But to end on a positive note. I do enjoy Thompson's concluding graf, and the observation he makes. "In an age of awareness, perhaps the person you see most clearly is yourself." The narcissism of emerging technology is another outstanding aspect of our digital century that I'd like to read more about. I fear we all take techno-enhanced narcissism as too much of a given, as somehow inevitable and copacetic. I rather believe it's neither.
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