A Brave New World

Thompson's main claim throughout this article appears to be that the entire construct of how we as a human race interact and make friends and keep up with what one another is doing is changing rapidly due to the growth of social media. No longer do we have to keep constantly keep asking what people are up to, to keep a conscious link among all of our friends. Social media allows for us to keep tabs on everyone, even those that we don't know that well. It creates a whole new mode of communication and allow for us to even make us feel as though we never really left a person, and can pick things up mid-conversation with people upon meeting them. To break up all of this information brought through the digital age, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook introduced the News Feed. He did this so that people would no longer have to search through everyone pages one at a time, it consolidated all of that information into one main page, allowing for people to see everything in their interests as soon as they log in. I think that this change tells alot about our attention span, in that it is slowly dying off and making us not want to have to search through things to find our interests, we want instant gratification in more aspects of our lives. I would say this hurts our literacy to a degree, as it isn't really communicating but more just reading what is going on around us. It does lead into conversations, though, so it could help it in a sense as well. All of these things lead to a sense of ambient awareness, a name for the constant, overlaying online contact that today's generation keeps on the world around it. I too have become a member in this pool of information, making sure to keep track of the news and what my friends are posting through media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter. It does create a paradox, though, in that while we can keep this awareness, it can often work as a way to replace the true, face to face interactions, distancing ourselves from the people we keep tabs on online and weakening the bonds of really talking to someone. Because these ambient updates are skimmable, short and often uninteresting to us based on various factors, this sort of dulls our literacy in that we are not interested to get into any deeper reading or always think deeper on what is actually going on in someones life, reading things at strictly face value. The author describes how this emerging media format is also adding to our "weak ties", people we are not actively friends with but still keep in contact with. These ties can be great for us as people because it keeps us interested in things that aren't necessarily an immediate part of our lives, as well as helping our problem solving through the internet because it gives us people that know us and may know far more than we do on certain topics we need help on. The younger generations feel more connected to this sort of media because of how quickly it is growing and how everyone around them is using it more and more avidly. They are forming more and more digital ties throughout the world, making a more connected world around themselves. This article defines literacy as our ability to make and extend friendships through our digital age and to be able to read peoples thoughts and emotions through the blurbs and comments that we post. We are learning to more quickly understand people and keep ties without actually being right in front of people talking to them and reading their faces, instead reading a digital face to see who people really are, or at least who they are when they are online. This reinforced my idea of how these articles are describing literacy in this new era, changing from our face to face interactions into a much more digital-centric age and shifting how the whole world can see what you are doing in an instant.