Participants told me that Twitter enabled them to stay in touch with faraway friends and deepened relational bonds with people they knew in person. Individual items from the lifestream, such as what music someone is listening to or where they are eating, probably have little or no intrinsic value to the audience. But each tidbit aggregates with other pieces of personal information to form a larger picture and reinforce a social bond. This experience was almost unanimously echoed by informants and was the most frequently cited benefit of Twitter.

Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, loc. 563