Before the internet, people would learn about parties or romantic relationships by gossiping or asking friends. This type of knowledge wasn't secret, but it wasn't available to everyone and was rarely written down. Today, any member of the networked audience can peruse a Facebook invite to see who was or wasn't invited, or look at Foursquare check-ins to see who is spending time together. Social information is digitized and aggregated through the lifestream to create a layer of relational data that lays over the ordinary social graph. While this information facilitated bonding and personal connection, it also magnified gossip, suspicion, and uncertainty.

Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, loc. 570