Some months back, Betsy had blogged about a New York Times article by Clive Thompson on how technologies such as Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter lead to ambient awareness. She wrote: “These technologies make it convenient to quickly and easily give or get updates with a number of other people.  Although each individual message might have little meaning as a stand-alone, researchers have found that reading frequent updates about a friend will, over time, give an observer a fairly sophisticated understanding of that friend and lead to the development of an empathic relationship“.

A recent article in Wall Street Journal offers a counter viewpoint. The author of the article, Julia Angwin, initially thought that the small talk enabled by Facebook and Twitter was replacing the need to ask someone “How are you?” Since small talk is an important part of building relationships that enable people to work and play together, she sought out to test whether digital small talk was as effective as real talk. She decided to investigate whether the updates she was getting via Facebook or Twitter were authentic, i.e., whether they reflected the true states of the individuals behind them.

By calling up her mom and a couple of friends, Julia found out that the daily digital updates did not actually give a true picture of these individuals. For instance, her mom’s garden was doing fine — just like she had mentioned in her tweets — but she was really upset about a friend’s illness — something that she had not tweeted about. The digital updates were not deceitful but, according to Julia, they were creating “a cocoon of information that may not paint a full picture of the truth.” She finds the daily digital feeds as reassuring but the next time she meets someone, she plans to ask “How are you, really?”

Which viewpoint do you agree with? Does Facebook and Twitter talk evoke empathy? What has been your experience? I invite you to share your thoughts below.