Digital Relationships

In this article, one of Thompson's main claims is that social media like Facebook and Twitter has made us even more close and intent in our friend's day to days lives. He argues how society blames us not as close to our friends as we used to before all the social media, because it's all we do and care about now, but in reality we know even more things are updated daily on our closest friends. He also argues that the more "friends" and more people you "follow" thins out your relationships even more and more as you add more people and you can no longer hold anymore intimate relationships because you're keeping up with a huge number of people. Zuckerburg introduced the News Feed in response to the large number of friends people were gaining. People didn't have the time to go from profile to profile checking up on their friends every day, causing them to lose touch. So in response he made a news feed that included posts from friends in order of the time they were posted, having the most recent be first. Allowing it to be easier to access and view updates from friends; which turned out to be a good idea.
Ambient Awareness is the ability to infer what kind of mood the publisher is in by their use of words and sometimes body language. However, there is a downfall on being so aware of our friends lives without even talking to them. You may know what's going on in their life, and they may know what's going on in yours but neither of you probably tell the whole word all the little details. Which is what you would discuss having a face to face conversation and is what connected you and continues to connect you in the first place. Without the outside connection, you will grow apart, which is what has happened to some of my old high school friends that don't attend the same college as me. An example of an ambient update is when Thompson was talking about how one of his friends on twitter posted how they weren't feeling good, and every day he would see a new update proving how much worse they were getting. In the end, he was able to see the day they turned around, and were finally healthy again.
Social media updates are in fact skimmable. There is no need to look at every single tweet, read every single word in every single paragraph because most of the time you can manage your time more efficiently and still understand what is trying to be said. As for our "weak ties" on social media, I never personally thought about it, but they are in face hurting us. The more and more friends we get on Facebook, the more people we follow on Twitter, the more people we are putting between our real friends and the more we have to divide up our time evenly to check up on every body. You would definitely be more intent on your friends and people you follow if you compared it to 15 people rather than 50 people.
Fads go in and out but people still stay on their old networking sites because where else do they have to go? They don't want to seem weak or lame by deleting their profile because then there is a chance people will forget about them. This article defines literacy as having a network, friends and interesting strangers to follow. The ability to keep up with a large crowd and not get caught behind.