Ambient Intimacy – Leisa Reichelt.

What it’s like to be connected with all these social spaces.

Chris Fey picture – graphpaper.com on twitter at sxsw

• photo of Andy’s bedroom – met him at a conference, read up on the person online, and then friended him – still felt like you’re getting to know him after you’re no longer talking to him. moved house, which I found out through flickr… quite intimate for someone you’ve met once.
• “ambience is non-directional and distributed”
• 30 boxes call it “situational awareness” (which you can first experience in Art of War)
• * “knowing what’s going on so you can figure out what to do next.”
• “hyper-connectivity” – om malik
• “hive mind”
• “virtual lice-picking”
• “distributed co-presence” [ito & okabe, 2005]
• * L: this is more the way it happens, than the effect.

Unlike voice-calls, this kind of messaging is a way of maintaining ongoing background communication with others [T: or other things!]

the quotation is …talking about text messaging, rather than twitter

• Dunbar number – cognitive limit of individuals that any one person can maintain social relationship with (ie: the number of people you can keep in your head AND their relationship to other people.) (This is limited by our neocortex). [And, as MW regularly points out, Dunbar is usually cited as being more precise/rigorous than he really ever intended this theory.]
• Can our tools allow us to go bigger than the Dunbar number?
  • “Inside the Monkeysphere” – when you’re a kid, and you see a teacher out of school, and you never thought they went anywhere other than your classroom – they don’t count in your monkeysphere.

• village greens as connection spaces. cf McLuhan:

‘the globe has been turned into a village by electronic media’

• you have to be careful what you declare – it can be googled very fast.
• you have to think things out more than in typical chat.
• at the same time, this lets you shape the image of yourself you present.
• are those people really friends? – the difference between “friends” and friends

people whinging about 140 character limits to their tweets miss the point.

“in linguistics, a phatic expression is one whos only function is to perform a social task”

• Twitter is purely phatic expresion – village green environments where we can wave to each other, etc.

“it’s not about being poked and prodded, it’s about exposing more surface area for others to connect with” (Johnnie Moore)

This kind of setup is a love/hate thing: it doesn’t necessarily fit into people’s lives.

“I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.”

“I love the noise that emanates from social networks”

Kathy Sierra expects it might be false connectedness.

“If we’re not careful, we can trick our brain into thinking it’s making physical connection.”

“ambient intimacy is not a replacement for real-life interaction.”

parse-ability:

• ambient communication is shared with you but not necessarily for you. Some people aren’t comfortable with this at all.
• constant partial attention stops you getting into flow states.

designers have a responsibility to support ambient intimacy.