Digital Intimacy

This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine has an outstanding article from Clive Thompson, who is writing about the impacts of the vast proliferation of Online Social Connection applications (e.g. Facebook and Twitter) on the social life of young people. He describes the tension between the growing networks of virtual friends, the feeling of connectedness to as many people as never before, and the constant story telling of people about their own life in a non-private but small circle environment.

It feels like a world that combines absolute transparency, self created reality shows without any breaks, and the urge to constantly describe you in a compelling manner. We all seem to become story tellers for our own small community of friends without any separation between On-and Offline, between relevant or irrelevant events, between private or public experiences. Most of us marketers have not yet full grasp the implications of this phenomenon for our marketing discipline. I will try to blog about this in the near future in more detail.