Thoughts on microblogging

First reflections nearly always seem to come in threes for me. I wonder what this means? Anyway, these three continue a thread that’s been running through recent posts on microblogging. So I’m suggesting that the key features of microblogging are: ambient intimacy; the materiality of devices and the immediacy effect. First, ambient intimacy, a term borrowed from Leisa Reichelt, who uses it, at least in part, to describe an ongoing lightweight communication between networked friends. Second, the materiality of devices seems important because it is the way in which we carry our connections with us or access them from static interfaces. Basically microblogging has to be dependent on a mediating object, and as these become more available and more portable this kind of social networking gets easier. Finally the immediacy effect is the other ingredient in that equation of remote presence. In microblogging, what seems most important is what is going on now (or nearly now), not what is archived from yesterday. Of course tweeting between timezones or from locations with dodgy signals tends to disrupt this, but the immediacy effect is my attempt to try to grapple with the perceived focus being on the most recent comments.