Not the granular tech, but the wave effect that matters

by. Lisa Hochgraf

“Who cares what you ate for breakfast?” was my first thought when I learned about Twitter during its early days.

I thought it was just me.

But recently I saw a presentation by technology journalist Clive Thompson, author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing our Minds for the Better. And I was heartened to learn that Thompson had a similar reaction when he first started tracking Twitter.

His corollary thought to “why would anyone care what you ate for breakfast” gave me pause. According to Thompson, it really isn’t the granular, singular description of your breakfast on Twitter that matters. It’s the collective waves and paths of thinking of many people over time that are truly interesting. He says social scientists call this effect of having insight into the larger picture of your network “ambient awareness.”

“Each little update–each individual bit of social information–is, on its own, pretty insignificant, even mundane,” he writes in Smarter Than You Think. “But taken together over time, the snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated protrait of your friends’ inner lives, like dots forming into a pointillist painting.”

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