Ambient awareness
There’s a term for the concept I was flirting with the other day: ambient awareness. I discovered this in Matt Webb’s very welcome blog posts.
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Ambient awareness is the idea that we can become implicitly aware of one another’s actions, thoughts and behaviour without having to be physically nearby. Here’s how Alex Soojung-Kim Pang describes it (stolen from the relevant page on cyborganthropology.com:)
“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”
All good, although not sure I completely agree that ‘this was never before possible…in the real world’. At scale perhaps, but I’d suggest that in a shared physical space, ambient awareness often comes for free. This is the social background I’d be interested in importing into our new distributed physical context.
