Clive Thompson has a well written and interesting article in this Sunday’s NYTimes Magazine about how online social networks (Twitter and Facebook primarily) are changing how we form friendships - or rather how we understand them conceptually - while also touching briefly on how these tools contribute to identity fragmentation (multiplicity of self).

It doesn’t floor me with anything incredibly new but it is clear and thought provoking and, as Xeni points out, articulates many things I thought and knew instinctively but was unable to put into words. The discussion of ‘ambient awareness’ is incredibly fascinating - friendships that devlop not as a result of constant contact but as a result consuming miniature (and often impersonal) snapshots.

I think it is important to note that we only know what people allow us to know, and vice versa. People choose to post about these different occurrences, on varied frequencies, varied levels of intimacy, and varied relations towards ‘objective’ reality. Towards the end of the article, there is an excellently written two-paragraph passage that I think encapsulates the bizarre and fascinating impact these networks can have:

Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor — a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem. Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early ’90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity — become someone new.

“If anything, it’s identity-constraining now,” Tufekci told me. “You can’t play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on you. I had a student who posted that she was downloading some Pearl Jam, and someone wrote on her wall, ‘Oh, right, ha-ha — I know you, and you’re not into that.’ ” She laughed. “You know that old cartoon? ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’? On the Internet today, everybody knows you’re a dog! If you don’t want people to know you’re a dog, you’d better stay away from a keyboard.”