Smarter Than You Think by Clive Thompson

Author:Clive Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2013-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

Ambient Awareness_

Who cares what you ate for breakfast?

That question has become a cliché of Internet criticism, the go-to response to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. And there is, it’s true, something off-putting about the world’s newest literary form, the bite-size “status statement,” at least at first glance. There’s the 140-character tweet about a celebrity or the Facebook link to a gushy news story you just read or a picture of your cat filtered to look like an acid flashback. Then there’s the “like”—a single flip of a social bit. When you consider the oceanic volume of this stuff, you might well conclude that it’s further proof that the Internet has shriveled our attention spans and strip-mined human intimacy. Why do we post so many teensy utterances? And why do we so eagerly devour them?

Ben Haley, a technical support specialist in Seattle, pondered this puzzle when, at the urging of a friend, he first signed up for Twitter in 2007. Like many, he couldn’t figure out why anyone would care about such brief messages. One friend tweeted about how she was becoming sick. Another posted links to random stories he was reading. Yet another—straight out of that playbook for vapid updates—would describe her lunch, every single day. Each tweet was so brief as to be virtually meaningless.

But as the months went by, something changed. By following his friends’ updates, Haley began to sense the rhythms of their lives. He developed a mental map of what they were doing and even thinking. He could tell when his friend was recovering from her illness. He could track his friend’s obsessions by seeing (and sometimes reading) articles he was linking to. Even the litany of sandwiches became spellbinding, a glimpse into the cadence of his friend’s life, wryly humorous and even poignant in their detail.

The flow began to seem like “a type of ESP,” Haley told me, an invisible dimension of information floating above everyday life. “It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,” he added. “I love that. I feel like I’m getting to something raw about my friends. It’s like I’ve got this heads-up display for them.” It also led to more real-life contact: When one member of Haley’s group broadcasted his plans to go to a bar, the others would see it, and some would drop by—a type of ad hoc self-organizing that has become common in young people’s lives. And Haley also noticed that when he did socialize face-to-face, the conversation was subtly altered. He and his friends didn’t need to ask, “So, what have you been up to?” because they already knew. Instead, they’d begin discussing something one of the friends posted that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.

Social scientists have a phrase for this type of ESP: “ambient awareness.” Ambient awareness is, they say, almost like being in the same room as someone and picking up on his mood and thoughts by the stray signals he gives off. You create a picture

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