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On September 10, my brother, Bill, checked out of the world for the day. At least he seemed to, from my perspective. All day I wondered about him, half worried, half curious. He was just hovering there in my consciousness while I went about my day and he went about his...whatever it was he was doing.

He lives in Portland and I'm in Illinois, so it's no surprise I'm not aware of his every move. For the past 20+ years, since he left our parents' house for college, I have had essentially no sense of what is going on in his life or mind on a random Wednesday.

But the last few months have been different. On July 14, because I suggested it and I am persistent, Bill signed up for a <a href="http://twitter.com/">Twitter</a> account and posted his first tweet. It took about a month for him to gain some momentum and regularity, but for the past month he's been tweeting about three or four times a day. He leaves tweets describing the antics of his dog, Henry; tweets about the concerts and movies he's seen; funny observations around his neighborhood; and lots of what one might call "political venting." Recently, he commented that my short anecdotes about Q and S are his favorite thing about Twitter. For an uncle who's hundreds of miles away from his charming little nieces, I'm not surprised.

So when Bill signed up for Twitter, we were suddenly connected. In an everyday way, not in the way you're connected to someone when you make a point of calling them on the phone once a week (which was more like once a month, in our case). I fell for Twitter almost immediately after signing up, but I love so much more now that my brother is there.

What's strange is that now, when a whole day passes without an update from Bill (as was the case on September 10), it sort of feels like he's somehow not out there in the world at all. Certainly, if he's not tweeting, I think, he must be lying in bed doing nothing. All day. I realize, of course, this makes no sense. He's going about his life exactly as he was before he started micro-blogging it. But it's the only way to describe this phenomenon I've noticed since Twitter has become a part of my life. Other friends on Twitter have mentioned the same sorts of illogical, but very real, sensations.

The next day, Bill was back, making up for Wednesday by posting five tweets. But that day I experienced another strange Twitter phenomenon. Jason, who usually gets my Twitter updates (and those of Bill and a few others) sent directly to his phone as text messages, had turned off that function the evening before, during a meeting, and forgot to turn it back on. Several times he asked me questions he would have known the answer to, had he been reading my tweets.

"Have you eaten lunch yet?" was the question he called to ask a half hour after I tweeted: "<span class="entry-content">eating a turkey-swiss sandwich on rye, a honeycrisp apple, and fritos. fritos remind me of my childhood more than any other chip." Then he asked "Did you have a productive morning?" even though I had posted three mid-morning tweets from the gym (productive, maybe, but not in the way he was thinking). My first impulse was to ask: "Haven't you been listening to me?!?" I felt like I had been talking to him all day and he had been only half tuned in, at best. Then I remembered he hadn't been receiving my tweets. He was imagining my day, in the best way he could, but he had none of the real information I expected him to have. It threw me. It threw our reality.
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A friend who follows me on Twitter and reads my blog knew I would be interested in an article in last Sunday's <em>New York Times Magazine</em>, called "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html?pagewanted=1&amp;ei=5124&amp;en=b87f67f56fa2fbe2&amp;ex=1378440000&amp;partner=permalink&amp;exprod=permalink">Brave New World of Digital Intimacy</a>." I finally got around to reading it today—it's so interesting. I'm particularly fascinated with a concept social scientists call "ambient awareness," as it relates to the scores of minutiae posted on Facebook and Twitter. Here's how the article's author, Clive Thompson, explains it:

<em>This is the paradox of ambient awareness. 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 was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would <span class="italic">bother</span> to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,â€ as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.</em>

An "invisible dimension floating over everyday life." Indeed. It's so invisible I can't seem to explain it to people who aren't themselves wrapped up in it, any more than I can explain the point of Twitter (Twitter users get this type of question a lot, I think: "But what's the <em>point</em> of telling everyone what you ate for lunch?")

If I think about it too hard, I really don't know. All I do know is that I really really like having Bill on Twitter with me. It makes me feel a bit like we live in the same town again, for the first time since we were kids. Because while it's the big stuff that makes you feel like you really know someone, it's the little stuff—like knowing what someone ate for lunch, or hearing their quick, gut response to the latest political news—that makes you feel close.