Twitter and the transformation of friendship

Do you use Twitter, the microblogging service that lets you keep your friends updated about your every move? Me no. You couldn't pay me to do it. Why would I want to tell everyone where I am, and what I'm doing? Why do I want to know where everybody else is, and what they're doing? The NYT Magazine today writes about how Twitter and related technology is changing the nature of intimacy. Excerpt:

Each day, Haley logged on to his account, and his friends' updates would appear as a long page of one- or two-line notes. He would check and recheck the account several times a day, or even several times an hour. The updates were indeed pretty banal. One friend would post about starting to feel sick; one posted random thoughts like "I really hate it when people clip their nails on the bus"; another Twittered whenever she made a sandwich -- and she made a sandwich every day. Each so-called tweet was so brief as to be virtually meaningless.

But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends' lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they'd scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.

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 like I can distantly read everyone's mind," Haley went on to say. "I love that. I feel like I'm getting to something raw about my friends. It's like I've got this heads-up display for them." It can also lead to more real-life contact, because when one member of Haley's group decides to go out to a bar or see a band and Twitters about his plans, the others see it, and some decide to drop by -- ad hoc, self-organizing socializing. And when they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they've never actually been apart. They don't need to ask, "So, what have you been up to?" because they already know. Instead, they'll begin discussing something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.

Again, I don't get the appeal of this. But this blog has altered my social interactions somewhat. I forget that people I know and actually see in my daily and weekly life read this blog. So often I'll start a conversation in the normal way humans do on our planet -- you know, by commenting on a current event, book or phenomenon -- and my conversation partner will have already read my thoughts on the matter on this blog. (Because as my wife says, disapprovingly, "You have no unblogged thoughts."). That's always a weird moment, because it gives me the sensation that somebody's reading my mind.

Blogging is a strange way of thinking in public. It's as much a diary as anything else. Half the things I post here don't reflect a settled opinion on anything, and therefore something I'd write in my newspaper column. I often float ideas that interest me, or half-persuade me, just to see what everybody has to say about it. The person you see on this blog is more like the person I really am than anything you'd see in my formal writing for publication. Or is he? The formal writing for publication usually represents a settled version of who I am -- the me that emerges after the volatile emotions and half-formed thoughts that I broadcast here in this weblog get thought fully through. Yet the audience for my old-media work and for this blog are two separate readerships, mostly.

I don't know where I'm going with this. So let me ask you: do you use Facebook? Do you use Twitter? If so, how has it affected your relationships?