"Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting."
This passage from the article "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy" briefly explains why technological social networking has become what it is today and why such an immense amount of people are involved with it. Almost everybody I know who is of our generation has a Facebook, Myspace, Twitter or some combination of the three. As mentioned in the article, Facebook, currently the most popular social networking site, has a mini-feed that allows a user to see each update that a freind makes.
The metaphor "like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting" creatively describes exactly how this phenomenon works. As the passage says, they are insignificant on their own, but once you see somebody update their status about nursing their hangover and post their pictures from the night before, it is easy to piece together what they did and where they did it. Even if you are not meaning to be updated on somebody's life, you can bet that you will see some type of information in your mini-feed, and if you want to know more you will "creep" (as my friends and I call it) on their page. This idea of knowing what is probably way too much information about a person via Facebook is what the networking trend is what the article is about and this passage depicts that in a creative and interesting way.
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