Clive Thompson is fast becoming one of my favourite writers. He usually writes articles about video games that I will never get to play because my life is too busy. I just finished reading a piece he wrote about how our continual connectedness to our friends and acquaintances online gives us a sense of awareness and closeness to each other that was never possible before.  The short, often silly status updates and blurbs about our friends online seem silly and banal individually, but when added together gives us a sense of closeness and awareness to each other that is quite powerful.

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’s a fascinating piece on how Facebook and Twitter and other services let us keep and maintain lots of relationships that would otherwise wither altogether, and even gives us a heightened sense of our social network.  It’s like a sense of ESP that quickly becomes part of us and we notice keenly when someone stops participating, or drops off.  I love this, and while I’m a chronic laggard on actually participating in Facebook usage, I can honestly say that since I got the iPhone I have checked in to the feed far more regularly and I can see how this really works.  It’s cool, cool stuff, like discovering you had another set of ears.