Ambient Socialization

Definition

Ambient socialization describes social interaction that occurs as a by-product of using a system rather than as its purpose — connection that accumulates in the background of activity undertaken for other reasons.

The term was used by Hooman Radfar, co-founder of Clearspring (later AddThis), in a 2009 post on his personal site.

Description

The concept is best understood by contrast with its neighbour. Ambient intimacy concerns the maintenance of existing relationships through low-intensity continuous signals. Ambient socialization concerns the formation of new ones — the way a system that is not a social network nonetheless produces encounters.

The mechanism is incidental co-presence. People using a service leave traces: a highlight in a book, a route on a map, a track played, a document edited, an item bought, a piece of code committed. When those traces are visible to others engaged in the same activity, encounters occur that neither party sought. The social layer is not a feature anyone opened the application to use; it is a residue of use.

Examples

• Seeing which passages other readers have highlighted in an e-book.
• Discovering someone through a shared playlist, a scrobbling service, or an "also listening" indicator.
• Encountering another contributor because you both edited the same wiki page or filed issues against the same repository.
• Running the same route as other people on a fitness platform and appearing on a shared segment leaderboard.
• Learning what colleagues are working on from document activity rather than from a meeting.

In each case the social information is a side effect of instrumenting an activity that was already happening.

Design Properties

• Zero marginal effort. Because participation is a by-product, the user contributes without additional work, which solves the cold-start problem that afflicts explicit social features.
• Shared context as introduction. People met this way already have a topic. The awkwardness of an unmotivated introduction does not arise.
• Weak ties at scale. The connections formed are overwhelmingly weak in Granovetter's sense — and, per his argument, correspondingly valuable for the transmission of new information.
• Consent is the hard part. The same property that makes ambient socialization effortless makes it a disclosure the user did not deliberately make. Systems that surface activity traces are publishing behaviour, and the difference between a delightful coincidence and a privacy failure is often only who the audience turns out to be.

Criticism

The concept is more often invoked in product design than examined in research, and it can serve as a euphemism: "ambient socialization" and "sharing user activity by default" describe the same mechanism with different valence. The useful test is whether the person whose trace is being surfaced would recognise the description of what is happening, and would have chosen it.

Related Reading

• Ambient Intimacy
• Charisma
• Status
• Social dialect