Brave New World of Digital Intimacy

Thompsons main idea in this article is that you can still connect with someone using these social media and feel like you understand them. With the use of social media, one can learn more about them than they do with a face to face interaction. Mark Zuckerburg created the newsfeed so that one can see someones information on one whole page rather than searching on that persons profile. I dont think this is a good thing for literacy because this takes out the whole process of researching and finding out on your own. Ambient awareness is being able to understand a friends mood and what is going on in their life. The use of social media can promote ambient awareness, but one may not want to know exactly what is going on every day in someones life and could become annoyed by the constant updates. An ambient update would be where someone talks about how their day went and how they feel about. Social media is more "skimmable" than an e-mail because in and e-mail someone is wanting your full attention and on a social media site its not nearly as important.