Continuous partial affection

For the past couple of months I've been thinking about continuous partial affection. It's not a Big Idea or anything; it's just an obvious play on a popular concept. Plus the words themselves have pleasant connotations. Compared to continuous partial attention, which sounds exhausting, continuous partial affection seems kind of nice.

Anyway, I couldn't think of an example until today. But Twitter seems like a good candidate. Assuming you define affection broadly as any kind of emotional attachment, what Twitter excels at is keeping you aware of those attachments in a diaphanous kind of way.

As Liz Lawley explains:

In a world where we’re seldom able to spend significant amounts of time with the people we care about (due not only to geographic dispersion, but also the realities of daily work and school commitments), having a mobile, lightweight method for both keeping people updated on what you’re doing and staying aware of what others are doing is powerful.

That's continuous partial affection.

(Not that I ever post updates on Twitter.)