I just finished the next-to-last draft of the Writing Intensive Curriculum winter term newsletter, and I should be using this energetic up-late time to work on Sara and my CCCC talk for next week, but I just read a post at jill/txt that got me thinking. Quoting Joi Ito, she describes Full-Time Intimate Communities:
FTICs are the close group of friends (usually around 8-10 people) with whom you share presence. Most mobile youths know whether members of their FTIC are awake, at school, happy, sick, finished with their homework, etc. They use their mobile phones to keep in touch with their FTIC usually sending state changes by text message.
Jill also wonders in one of her comments: “I was wondering whether FTICs actually really exist, or whether they’re descriptions of rather rare activities – that well, might even be used as advertising for a feature people didn’t know they needed.”
I too wonder how rare they are. I taught middle school two years ago (which I know is like an eon ago in the age of such quickly developing technologies), but I don’t think my students were that connected electronically to each other. Then again, I taught in rural Iowa, which was a bit behind other parts of the country and world when it came to certain technologies (while quite a few of my students had cell phones, only a select few had iPods and most were not that computer savvy, though there were a few that could show me up at certain things.
But I wonder if this phenomenon is growing. I remember reading on someone’s blog (whose was it and when?) that teenagers were keeping strict tabs on their boyfriends and girlfriends through text messaging on cell phones, so that they knew where each other were at all times.
Jill writes that she’s too old to have experienced this, but I feel like at times I’m part of a quasi FTIC, though definitely not fully. There are days (and sometimes even weeks) when I can tell you where certain friends are and what they’re doing almost without fail because of text messaging, instant messaging, facebook updates, livejournal posts, and other blog posts. However, we aren’t that symbiotic (I might be able to tell you where someone is, but I wouldn’t have a clue if they’ve finished a certain paper or not; I rarely share photos with friends, except through facebook).
Hmmm… Looks like I’m too old to experience this FTIC as well… [and, as a closing aside, I wonder about the word “intimate” — sure, it’s intimate in that someone is intimate with your location and habits, but how intimate is it personal/affective wise?]
