Social Proprioception?

The following link is to an article in wired magazine on twitter. The author, Clive Thompson makes several points about twitter but the one that I found the most provocative was that " twitter is a collectivist way to keep abreast of what your friends are doing and what is going on in their lives". I find this assertion dubious because the promise of technology and its' efficiency was supposed to provide us with more free time to spend with each other but from this perspective some of this new found freedom would be spent making post form various artifacts about what you are doing.


So why has Twitter been so misunderstood? Because it's experiential. Scrolling through random Twitter messages can't explain the appeal. You have to do it — and, more important, do it with friends. (Monitoring the lives of total strangers is fun but doesn't have the same addictive effect.) Critics sneer at Twitter and Dodgeball as hipster narcissism, but the real appeal of Twitter is almost the inverse of narcissism. It's practically collectivist — you're creating a shared understanding larger than yourself.
www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-07/st_thompson