Ambient Awareness

Definition

Ambient awareness is best defined by Leisa Reichelt. One of her definitions is that ambient awareness 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." Ambient awareness is a way of describing the idea of being ‘ambiently aware’ of another’s actions, thoughts and experiences without having to be near them physically, or requesting such information.

Many social network clients 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 feel connected to 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.

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 to create larger narratives and important stories. Future 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....”.

This 'invisible dimension floating over everyday life' 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.

The paradox and allure of ambient awareness lies in its shape. It’s not that we’re always connected, but that we have always ability to connect. This is ambient intimacy, where connectivity is only a button away. Where sharing and connecting with another is not defined by geography but technosocial capability. David Weinberger called it “continual partial friendship”, and Johnnie Moore pointed out that, “it’s not about being poked and prodded, it’s about exposing more surface area for others to connect with”. Reality theorist Sheldon Renan calls it “Loosely but deeply entangled”. Whatever you call it, it is a higher order of connectivity than we’ve ever experienced before as humans. We are beginning to see a new sense of time – the collective now.

We’re really seeing is that everything is a button away. We are mobile, and we need just in time information. In our mother’s wombs, all things came to us without us having to go anywhere. It is the same with the Smartphone. Even though we move around in time and space, we can increasingly access social and entertainment sentience via a single device. Our devices and surrounding have become a sort of technosocial womb.

For Leisa, these online social interactions are not the social equivalent of junk food. There are others that disagree. Anyone who has seen someone compulsively check an activity stream of information on their phone has a right to feel that these streams can become addicting. And rightly so, ambient intimacy is not a replacement for real-life interaction. It is more of an atmospheric communication, a set of small moments that are not intended to receive full attention. Moments in the periphery. It is only when these peripheral moments become excessive and primary that they become digital junk food.

Why a junk food analogy? The promise of fast food is that it requires minimal effort and time to order, receive and consume. What Reichelt noted was that humans were "expending almost no energy at all on getting to grips with this info, it’s just there to take it all in if we want".

These ambient systems also provide issues of information overload. According to New Scientist, there was an article that said ‘Infomania dents IQ more than marijuana’. Those exposed to an excess of information had their IQ's reduced by 10 points. Again, Dave Weinberger, says, it helps that the 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? Because it's easier to connect ambiently than it is to do so offline. Those who design application in the future need to take two things into mind in order to be considered an ambient application. On one hand, an app has to be undemanding, but at the same time it does need to be intrusive enough that one is able to pay attention to it." It can’t just be an app that is installed and forgotten about. Rather, it needs to be more like the old-fashioned village green. You walk through the village green on way to do something else, but on the way you bump into people. So needs to support the people that you see, that you're waving to, but without getting in the way of what you need to get done.

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