Ambient Awareness

Definition

The idea of being ‘ambiently aware’ of another’s actions, thoughts and experiences without having to be near them physically, or requesting such information. Strong social networks provide this type of ambient awareness.

“Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness”. It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, signs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online” , the article points out, and then goes on to mention that this is due to the rise in microblogging services that are available and frequently used, such as Twitter. Many Twitter clients, for instance, have notification settings that provide pop-ups that pop over windows on a computer screen, allowing a tiny window into the lives of others. Once can sit at an office computer all day and never feel disconnected from friends, because they are being let in on the lives and happening of others bit by bit, in tiny digestible pieces, over the course of the day.

And unlike mailing letters with long updates or meeting friends in person to “catch up”, one can easily feel as if they’re being caught up at every moment by receiving these updates or browsing a stream of text or reporting by those they know. These messages aren’t going to anyone in particular, and they can easily be ignored by those who see them, but this one to many broadcast capability. But, as one commenter wrote, “Ambient awareness of useless information is still useless”.

"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 bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life".

This is the chief concern of those who create rapidly accessed and changing information technologies. Facebook’s algorithm strives to keep information displayed relevant, and, if not relevant, interesting enough to browse through and click on. Twitter basically sets new users as default ‘socially opted out’ until they gather content to follow. When they encounter something they don’t like, they’re free to drop them.

In Ambient awareness, lifestreams and personal storytelling. Will it change my relation to You? Lisbeth Klastrup has this to say about Ambient Intimacy, especially with regard to Clive Thompson’s article in the NYTimes Magazine. “Will it continue like this?”, she asks. “At the heart of all these speculations about what we do this and what is happening to our social sphere as we do it, the most interesting question linked to these current “trends” in the development of personal storytelling (as I like to call it) is of course: will it continue? Will microblogging and mobile posting about your own life and tracking other people’s lifestreams (those of real friends, as well as “weak tie” acquaintances and remote colleagues) become of an integral part of the future digital native’s “social being in the world”? Will we develop mental capacities and methods to handle this constant ambient awareness of other people’s lives? - Or is it a “bubble” that will eventually burst, and return us to a way of living where we keep personal communication about ourselves at a minimum and mostly focus on those near and dear to us, whether it be in digital or analogue mode?”.

The mundanity of this informational exchange might seem off-putting at first. Indeed, that’s what drove so many away from Twitter in the first place, but these pieces of information build up over time Alex Soojung-Kim Pang writes that “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 bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life....”.

Simultaneous Time

The point is that we live in lives whose ability to spend “complete, uninterrupted time” is truncated by the multiplicity of attention that living in Simultaneous Time brings. In a way, these micro updates are small enough to be digestible. Small enough to fit into the corners of our days and hours and minutes. Quick enough to gather with a quick glance, and minute enough to be ignored without serious guilt. They are omnipresent and neverending, always available if one only clicks. A river of data, of which no observation is the same twice. This could also be called Ambient Intimacy.

Definition

"
Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible."

History

Ambient intimacy is a term coined by Leisa Reichelt. She wanted a term to express certain behaviours people exhibit through technosocial interactions and the feeling those interactions gave her. Reichelt found herself compelled to come up with a name for this weird, creepy & exciting feeling of floating, diffuse intimate moments.

While Twitter made this concept more visible to Reichelt and others thinking about it, these types of interactions predate the internet.

Text messaging. Ongoing background awareness of others. Easier now to broadcast/communicate with a larger network. On Facebook, teens regularly communicate with about a dozen or so contacts, though they have 100-150 “friends”. Dunbar, etc.

Other attempts at coming up with a term:

• 30 boxes: “situational awareness”. A bit too task-focused.
• Om Malik: “hyper-connectivity”, like justin.tv. Not that either, because you’re not always “on”. It’s a trail.
• Dave Linabury: “hive mind” in a blog comment.
• Andrew Duval: “lice picking” (steph-note: we could say “grooming” instead.)
• Ito & Okabe: “distributed co-presence”, 2005 — more the mechanics than the effect
• etc…

“Intimacy” better than “co-presence”, because this is about human relationships and supporting them.

David Weinberger: “continual partial friendship” Johnnie Moore: “it’s not about being poked and prodded, it’s about exposing more surface area for others to connect with.”

We’re craving attraction, cf. Generation Me, chapter 4.

For Leisa, these online social interactions are not the social equivalent of junk food.

Ambient intimacy is not a replacement for real-life interaction. Atmospheric communication.

Writing and receiving communications which are not intended to receive full attention.

Leisa doesn’t feel like IM/Twitter etc. prevent her from doing whatever she is doing. The interruptions are stressful according to Kathy Sierra, and prevents one from reaching the state of flow.

David Weinberger: it helps that the volume of flow information is so high that there is no expectation that it is all followed.

If it bugs you, distracts you, well, shut it down for a while. Is that too simple?

Design to support ambient intimacy. Think about ambiance.

http://strange.corante.com/2007/10/04/fowa07b-leisa-reichelt FOWA07b: Leisa Reichelt

Posted by Suw Charman-Anderson

Ambient intimacy, dates to Feb or March this year, associated with a photo on Flickr of Andy Budd’s bedroom, when you compare this to other stuff online, that’s not so intimate. We can learn so much about people, much more quickly than we ever could before. So now we’ve got Facebook status, Twitter, Last.fm, Flickr, Dopplr - gives us a huge amount of info about people.

What’s more amazing is that we’re expending almost no energy at all on getting to grips iwth this info, it’s just there to take it all in if we want. These are the kind of things that represent ambient intimacy that are really lightweight powerful ways to communicate: twitter, flickr, facebooks, myspace, lastfm, dopplr, upcoming, skyype status, IM presence, RSS readers, blog posts, comments, Jaiku…

Ambient - atmospheric, part of your environment, non-directed, no specific purpose, distributed. Not one-to-one, not a conversation but also not broadcast. Messages that are going into a sort of defined area and creating this effect. Intimacy, results in some interesting search terms. Wasn’t thinking about that sort of intimacy when coined term. Japanese mobile phone research looking into teen usage. Discovered stuff about news generation, personal archiving, etc. But also using text messages to create techno-social system to stay in touch even when they couldn’t be in any oother way. similarto the experiences we have now with these social technologies.

Found that teens were using msging to maintain open social channels. Not important messages, just about awareness of location and activity. This research is 10 years or older. But could be talking about Twitter - using Twitter very similar way to way Japanese teens were using texts 10 years ago.

People have been trying to understand this for quite a period of time. Robin Dunbar has worked on this for a white, but focuses on primate behaviour. Dunbar’s number. Also a great book “Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language”. Dunbar interesting re: Twitter because we talk about the human imperative to communicate and create relationships. He says that the reason that our brains are the size they are is to track all our relationships with other humans, so we can outmanouvre them to get food, sex, climb the pecking order.

Grooming, picking fleas, is about forming these relationships. But you can only pick fleas on one primate at the time. Language allows you to “pick fleas” on more than one person at a time. Allows us to keep track of lots of poeple and who knows what and who and how they fit together and how you fit in with them. Explains a lot about why she has the imperative to connect the way she does. But our troupes have expanded, from primates to modern world. Twitter or Jaiku, use to pick each others’ fleas en masse. Gives phatic expressiveness to a virtual space. Phat expression is speech where the function is to share feelings and be social, not about ideas or information. Hey, how are you? Internet has lots of places for our smart idea, but what it hasn’t had until recently, is a place for “hey, how are you?”. Flickr, Twitter, really amazing in terms of ways that they can transcend time and space to give us micro-insight into people’s lives on a day to day basis.

David Weinberger “continual partial friendship”.

Johnnie Moor” about exposing more sufface area for others to connect with.

About overcoming geographical dislocation that’s part of our lives. But it’s a love/hate thing. Notcied that hte more specifically that an app supposts just ambient intimacy, the more polarised people are. People really do hate or love it. Kathy Sierra worries that such things are false interaction, that our brain needs a full interaction experience, including body language, tone of voice, etc. but Twitter only does a bit of that, and that causes stress to your brain. If we thought that ambient intimacy was the only intimacy we would ever need, then there may be a problem. But it’s really part of a balanced diet.

Also an issue of information overload. According to New Scienties, there was an article that said ‘infomania dents IQ more than marijuana’, IQ was reduced by 10 points. Again, Dave Weinberger, says, it helps that hte volume of stuff is to great that there’s 0 expectation that you can keep up.

But all of these things, this possible false connectiveness, and information overload, leads us to think what do we get out of it? Why do we bother?

Small Tom Coates moment, who cribbed it from Peter Kollack:

Why people take part:

1. anticipated reciprocity
2. reputation
3. sense of efficacy
3. identification with a group List represents great insentives: getting value back from your network, increasing your reputations which helps you get more opportunities, and having a crowd to run with. Crowd you run with online can be more and more valuable as you add to it.

Robert Wright - two types of game, win/lose game, zero sum game where everyone wins. (Also a third game, Test Cricket.) As you build up the network, the network grows smarter, so you can draw on that network back when there’s osmething tha you need. When I need ideas or contacts or experience, and the first port of call is Twitter or Facebook, for both personal and professional stuff. Less about egotistically saying what I had for brekkie, but building a high-value network. Feeding into the network, in ways that can be valuable - it’s not wasting time. Designers need to take responsibility for designing apps that take into account the fact that we human beings are highly distractable, and to try and reduce congnitive load involved in keeping track of our social networks, and maintaining aareness.

Ambience kicks in again - your app has to be undemanding, but at the same time it does need to be intrusive enough that they are able to pay attention to it, it can’t just ben an app that is installed and forgotten about. Needs to be more like the old-fashioned village green, so you walk through the village green on way to do something else, but on the way will bum pinto people. So needs to support hte people that you see, that your’e waaving to, but without getitng in the way of what you need to get done.

Key principles need to keep in mind. top six: not rocket science: 1. Keep it lightweight - it’ not supposed to be the centre of attention, small footbrint, keep in mind that copious functionality isn’t necessarily a good things, keep it simple.
2. stay out of the way - invisibility, your app is about facilitating a social network, it’s not aobut you or your company or your app, so more you reduce resistance this message being delivered and recieved, the better your app is. So if you send an email to say there’s a message on yoru social network, so you have to log in to see it, then that’s not a good way of staying out of the way. Desktop app that shows me your stuff, that’s better.
3. open your API - not about controlling the way your communication happens. Twitter and Flickr do this, once they opened their API, the innovation that developed blossomed.
APIs support openness between platforms, your app is not an islenad, you are not going to hold people in your space. Need to recognise that people use different apps in a suite, so how can you integrate with that group rather than siilo ourselves off.
4. portable social networks - Think that people use different apps all the time, and i fyou usre more than two or three you know there is no joy in maintaining lots of lists of friends. This isn’t about locking peole in, you are part of a greater environment, so look for ways to make use of other lists, or make your list more portable.
5. use the periphery - small movements, just be there hovering in the background, grab attention only when you need to.
6. allow for time-shifting - whilst its about being in the moment, we do need to be able to go back and catch up on stuff.

Twitterific, designed to use Twitter’s API, so when someone sends a Twitter, it delivers through a little window that opens. Colour is very background, it’s transparent, it’s not demanding and distracting, and f you you don’t interact with it, it just fades away as if it was never there at all.

Refinement of IM, or Growl messaging, and it’s better because of timing - IM messages often flick on and off too quickly. Twitterific have thought more carefully about how long it needs to be there to be useful. Pretty much all of these are in action, except portable social networks, is being done by Twitter and Twitterific. Ambient intimacy is more than a passing phenomenon.

Further Reading

• Ambient Intimacy
• Cyborg Cartography
• Publications in the field of Ambient Awareness by researchers at the Ambient Awareness Project based in the Netherlands
• I’m so Digitally Close to You
• Ambient awareness, lifestreams and personal storytelling. Will it change my relation to You?
• The End of Cyberspace - Clive Thompson on Ambient Awareness.

External Links

Ambient Intimacy: Presentation on Slideshare