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“Facebook and Twitter may have pushed things into overdrive, but the idea of using communication tools as a form of ‘co-presence’ has been around for a while. 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.
‘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.’
(“Brave New World of Digital Intimacy” | The New York Times Magazine)
