Mass intimacy

In a great write-up, Daneil W. E. Light (whose blog title of ‘idea IS the format’ in itself is a talking point) talks about a collective sense of connectivity, opened secrecy and intimacy based around the idea of ‘we’ instead of ‘i’.

Are we moving towards a collective intelligence?

Or maybe not? Twitter was the big story of last year, with a massive growth in users signing up to use it around the world. What I’ve noticed is that people I come into contact with are increasingly opening up their lives to inspection from outside through this form of microblogging. It’s not heavy on intelligence but it’s high on immediacy and this concept of intimacy is scaled up when intimacy and immediacy are combined. As Sixball said yesterday, Twitter has tapped into a trend towards there being a growing desire for constant ‘presence’ for the die-hard social media fan. And presence is nothing without connectivity and immediacy.

What implications does this increased intimacy have for us as people?

Privacy

Why are we so comfortable with this level of transparency? What are the motivators behind it? Are we missing some huge privacy issues? It’s easy to conceive of someone publishing their home address and then publishing a tweet saying ‘I’m away for the next few weeks in Thailand! Woot!’ and then coming home to find they’ve been burgled.

Ethics of blogging/tweeting others

Transparency of one’s own actions is all very well, but where do we draw the line on publishing information about who we are with or responsible for? Is it ethical to be publishing baby photos for instance? What happens when your daughter ends up being prime minister? Will she think it’s great that people can find photos of her building a sandcastle at her first job interview? Or worse? Where do we draw the line on what’s blog-safe or twitter-safe?

While we were at SXSWi one of our party published an apparently innocous tweet about a ‘big story’ about to break, which generated a couple of hours of stressful phone calls and conversation. Transparency and intimacy are great, but sometimes they can jump up and bite you.

Information overload

I’m not the only one having trouble with feeling overloaded by all of the information that flies at me daily - email is broken (I get so much I can’t read all of it), RSS feels like a flood (I have too many people I want to track), Twitter is like a river (I can occasionally make sense of it) and that’s not counting physical mail, phone calls, voicemail - all of it piles up and up. This constant stream of information from multiple sources is exciting but I am finding my attention span rapidly reducing over time. Tantek has an interesting approach to tackling it.

I now notice that if a web page does not load in 0.25 seconds I have already opened a new tab to go and do something else. In fact I am sitting here with at least 30 tabs open, and probably the same number of windows, a laptop with twice that, a twitter client beeping at me, gmail messages coming in, facebook lists in a left hand column in Flock, Flickr images from my contacts scrolling in at the top and a Google Reader window sitting open. That’s just what I can see…

The concepts of ‘now’ and ‘here’

‘Now’ is great and everything, but a lot of people at SXSW seemed to be spending more of their time on their mobiles twittering about what they were doing than actually spending time to actually be doing what they are doing.

Are we eroding our concept of ‘here and now’? Is this just an extension of the idea of ‘the grass is greener’? The urge to connect remotely could have strong negative impacts on our ability to connect with those around us in meaningful ways. Could twitter be a route to having lots of remote friends and fewer local ones?

Something of a backlash in the offing?

As a few people said at SXSW, “I’m not really using Facebook right now?”

I logged off a few weeks ago when all of the furore over Scrabulous kicked off, and my last daily useful feature became under threat. I’d already moved my updates over to Twitter. Which leaves me with Facebook as a handy address book, and maybe as a way of keeping track of a few events. This month has seen the first decline in Facebook users, and with the over-the-top targetted ads I think Facebook has had its day. Bizarrely (I thought I wouldn’t say this but) I seem to be moving back towards using LinkedIn with their fancy new layout and behind the scenes smart thinking.

Owning your intimacy

If it’s all going to be about intimacy, then I want to own my intimate connections with others rather than renting it out for others to cash in on. I’m starting to realise where the OpenSocial idea may actually have some legs - handing back control of the ‘mass intimacy’ to the masses?