Two people pointed me to this blog posting about Twitter and how it creates "ambient awareness" of each other. Actually, the posting is an excerpt from a New York Times Magazine article published on Sept 7. What I notice is how quickly the news spreads because it’s excerpted on a blog (that viral thing), more than if it just came out in print. So of course, I tweeted the blog posting. I don’t even want to check how many people have blogged and tweeted about the posting or the original article. My incredibly unresearched guess is…a lot. Based on a Googling of the words, ambient awareness, I’m actually late to the game in blogging about this.

All of this serves to remind me of Simon’s concept of eco-systems. We actually don’t know what the entire eco-system looks like until it’s put to the test–when a natural disaster like an earthquake hits or a presidential candidate announces his running mate or a celebrity makes a gaffe in a public setting.

Twitter helps the ordinary person create a more robust eco-system, without the need for a dramatic event as an excuse to connect. The NYT article points out that it’s not the mundane items that people are telling us about on Twitter that’s important. It’s the shape of our lives that is revealed by tweets over time. When we understand the shape, anyone at any time can connect to us where we left off.

I suppose it’s no different from my experience of meeting someone in person who had read my other blog for years. He sprinkled throughout our conversation things that I had blogged about–my sister moving to Colorado, shopping for a toilet, and god knows what else. I blog and then I forget. But other people don’t. It’s eerie.

All of this is to say that technology, social media in particular, is changing who and what we know about each other. You can use that capability wisely. Or not at all. It’s your choice.