People like to pick on bloggers. I guess I can see where they might be coming from. Compared to the thoughtful essays I wrote to impress my Poli Sci or Religious Studies profs, or the stories and reflections I’ve written for contests and print publications, my blog posts are hastily written and poorly thought out. What’s worse, the long, carefully crafted philosophical entries get very little validation, while cranky diatribes against Mormonism send traffic through the roof. And compared to blogging, tweets (twitter updates) and Facebook status updates seem even more banal. I mean, who really wants to hear a play by play description of my struggles with insomnia: “can’t sleep, tweeting instead”? Collectively, blogging, text messaging, and new social networking technologies are blamed for increasing disrespect for elders, widening the red/blue state divide, stupidifying and pornifying America and increasing the sales of Viagra.

In spite of all this naysaying from tweed-wearing, pipe-smoking critics, I’ve been blogging for eight years (that’s like, geological eras, in Internet years) and drank the Facebook and Twitter Kool-Aide. It’s always been my belief that it’s not the single post that gives the blog its value–that comes from the sustained conversation over time and the community that develops within the blog and across the web space. That circle of friends isn’t built on the value of one drunken but accidentally deep philosophical pronouncement, but on the aggregate of dozens of lunches, late night conversations, and “Duuude, what’s up?” spoken or texted a thousand times across the ether. And now there’s a New York Times article to back me up! Take that, tweedy biotches! (and a long hat tip to Kaimi for pointing me to The Brave New World of Digital Intimacy. Dude, what’s up!?) It’s mostly about the social impact of Facebook status updates and twittering phenomena (my tweets flow straight into my facebook status, so they’re combined for me).

Here are a few choice excerpts:

1. Ambient Intimacy:

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…it can be extremely hard to understand the phenomenon until you’ve experienced it. Merely looking at a stranger’s Twitter or Facebook feed isn’t interesting, because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day, though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it’s a novel.

2. The strength of weak ties:

But where their sociality had truly exploded was in their “weak ties” — loose acquaintances, people they knew less well. It might be someone they met at a conference, or someone from high school who recently “friended” them on Facebook, or somebody from last year’s holiday party…This rapid growth of weak ties can be a very good thing. Sociologists have long found that “weak ties” greatly expand your ability to solve problems. For example, if you’re looking for a job and ask your friends, they won’t be much help; they’re too similar to you, and thus probably won’t have any leads that you don’t already have yourself. Remote acquaintances will be much more useful, because they’re farther afield, yet still socially intimate enough to want to help you out.

3. Tools for deepening core relationships:

Facebook and Twitter may have pushed things into overdrive, but the idea of using communication tools as a form of “co-presence” has been around for a while. The Japanese sociologist Mizuko Ito first noticed it with mobile phones: lovers who were working in different cities would send text messages back and forth all night — tiny updates like “enjoying a glass of wine now” or “watching TV while lying on the couch.” They were doing it partly because talking for hours on mobile phones isn’t very comfortable (or affordable). But they also discovered that the little Ping-Ponging messages felt even more intimate than a phone call. “It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley, told me. “No message is the single-most-important message. It’s sort of like when you’re sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.”

4. Management of personal image:

[for] people in their 20s who were in college when Facebook appeared and have never lived as adults without online awareness…participation isn’t optional. If you don’t dive in, other people will define who you are. So you constantly stream your pictures, your thoughts, your relationship status and what you’re doing — right now! — if only to ensure the virtual version of you is accurate, or at least the one you want to present to the world…Young people today are already developing an attitude toward their privacy that is simultaneously vigilant and laissez-faire. They curate their online personas as carefully as possible, knowing that everyone is watching — but they have also learned to shrug and accept the limits of what they can control.

5. Increased self-awareness:

But there is another — quite different — result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter’s Web site — “What are you doing?” — can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?) Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they’re trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.