The Times is Writing About Status Updates (16 Hours Ago)

Today's NY Times Magazine has an in-depth exploration of the microblogging phenomenon brought on by sites such as Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. Its author Clive Thompson (whose Twitter feed updates in a widget to the right of the article) makes a case that the incessant posting of snippets of people's lives represents more just than a signal that we are in an era of oversharing. He says that over time one's tweets become "like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting" and that following someone's feed "for a day...and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it’s a novel." While some fear that too many of these "parasocial relationships" will crowd out real ones, Thompson ultimately makes the case that having so much of the minutia of our lives revealed online "brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where everybody knows your business."