receiver magazine      #22 | Seizing the moment

Leisa Reichelt is a user experience consultant. Based in London for quite some time, she has Australian roots and researched the use of mobile phones to faciliate 'presence' for her Masters at the University of Technology, Sydney. She does freelance contextual research and user centred design and is interested in understanding and improving the experiences people have when encountering technology, with a special focus on the intersection of design and being social. Leisa writes about all of this (and more) at her blog, disambiguity.com. Why do I care about who you're meeting for drinks tonight? Or any of the other seemly random updates you might be making on Twitter or Facebook? In her receiver piece, Leisa Reichelt reflects on the effects of awareness tools and how the sharing of moments, small occurrences and observations, can create feelings of closeness with people who you'd otherwise hardly (or never) know at all.

Website: http://disambiguity.com

Illustration by Wilm Lindenblatt ...........................................................................................................................................................................

It was March 2007 and I was sitting on the Heathrow Express, waiting for the train to pull out and take me to the airport so I could get a flight to Dallas, Texas to attend the South by Southwest conference. With a few minutes to kill, I pulled out my mobile phone to see if any of my 'friends' had posted anything interesting to Twitter. I noticed that one of my friends (who in fact I'd really only met in person once and even then only very briefly) had tweeted to say he was on his way to Gatwick to get a flight to Dallas and SXSW. That got me thinking... what are the chances that two planes were leaving London for Dallas, at almost the same time, from different airports? I reached into my bag and pulled out my itinerary to discover that I was on my way to the wrong airport! Grabbing my bag and squeezing out the doors just as the train was about to depart, I made a mad dash for Gatwick airport, checking in for my flight with minutes to spare. Thank goodness for Twitter (and Jeremy).

Tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr that allow us to provide our friends with an almost constant stream of narrative from our everyday life, have changed the way that many of us relate to each other and the world around us. Although often criticised as mundane, the status update when considered in the context of all the updates related to it by subject matter or social connections, is resulting in some very interesting and powerful effects for participants in this wave of communication.

I was initially struck by the power of Twitter and Flickr, in particular, when I started 'connecting' with people who I was meeting at conferences. In the past, I would meet someone interesting at a conference, swap business cards and resolve to stay in touch, then hear nothing from them (or them from me!) until we ran into each other twelve months later, again at a conference. It was nice to meet people at conferences but you never really got to know them very well. All of this changed with Twitter and Flickr. On my return from conferences, they continued to share their life with me; from pictures of their new house, to a moan about work, to commitment to vegetarianism. All things I would probably never have known about them without Twitter and Flickr.

Who cares? Who wants this level of detail? Isn't this all just annoying noise? There are certainly many people who think this but they tend to be not so noisy themselves. It seems to me that there are lots of people for whom being social is very much a real life activity and technology is about getting stuff done.

There are a lot of us who find great value in this on-going noise. It helps us get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances; and it makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we're not able to participate as closely as we'd like.

Knowing these details creates intimacy and it also saves a lot of time when you finally do get to catch up with these people in real life! It's a particular way of communicating, phatic communication, that we've used in off-line life since we first evolved language. Phatic communication is not about conveying meaning; it's just about making a connection, being in touch. When we ask ΄how are you?', we're mostly just connecting, not really expecting a full and meaningful answer in response.

This is not an effect or an activity that is new or that is inherently connected to new social tools – much the same was observed by Mizuko Ito and Daisuke Okabe in their research study into the use of camera phones back in 2004. They found that, "messaging can be a way of maintaining ongoing background awareness of others, and of keeping multiple channels of communication open".

I call this effect 'ambient intimacy'. 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.

Ambient is for the lightness, the atmospheric, non-directional and distributed nature of the communication. These are communications that are one to many; they're not quite broadcast and yet not exactly conversational; they flood over a somewhat defined space. Within that space is intimacy: the closeness, familiarity and warmth that this kind of communication can create and the ever-present network of friends available wherever you can access the internet, or even just send a text message.

Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they've redecorated their bedroom or their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they're hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them or who they're having drinks with tonight. On its own, such a status update may seem trivial but to examine an update in isolation is to miss the point of the social system that is at play here. These apparently trivial updates are really critical to maintaining connection with a network of often loose ties – a network that can give rich social rewards to those who participate.

I'm a freelancer and I work from home a lot. There are lots of great things about freelancing but it can get a little lonely. It can also be hard to stay in touch with what is new and interesting in your industry and who is doing interesting things. I no longer have that problem, thanks to the amazing connections that I have, especially on my Twitter account and the way that they share what they are working on, what they are reading, what they think is interesting and so much more.

These days my professional network is no longer restricted to my office: it extends around the world and across a range of industries and professions. It includes a number of people whose work I have admired and aspired to for years; people whom I would never previously have had access to except, perhaps, to buy their book.

More and more people are discovering that the connectedness and serendipity of ambient intimacy extend beyond just being social and can also bring great professional gains as well. Ambient intimacy plays many roles in my life: it has stopped me from missing an important international flight and helped me keep sane whilst at home with a small baby. It is my outsourced tech support resource, my recommendation engine and my news filter. Twitter lets me virtually attend conferences I cannot get to but am interested in. Most valuably of all, it has allowed me to create, maintain and even build professional and personal relationships with people in my field whose work I admire and from whom I have been able to learn and develop as a professional.

A few months ago, right in the middle of a very busy project, my MacBook just stopped working. I had to get a new one and I needed to get access to the data on my old hard drive straight away. Here's the problem: I have absolutely no idea how to get data off a hard drive in a dead MacBook and onto a new one. What to do? In the old days, I would have had to find a friend who knew this (not impossible) and hope they were willing and available to help me out. Now, thanks to Twitter, I simply Tweeted my situation. Within minutes, complete strangers were offering to help me; to virtually walk me through the process and hold my hand. Amazing. And so, thanks to ambient intimacy, my data was recovered and my project carried on as planned – disaster averted!

Critics allege that the closeness we feel from this kind of communication is artificial and potentially damaging: that it causes cognitive dissonance, with our brain thinking it is experiencing closeness, when it actually isn't. More and more scientists are looking to show that Facebook is going to break us (or our children) and that interaction on-line is less 'real' than face to face.

I'm the last person to suggest that ambient intimacy could, or should, replace the other kinds of intimacy we're already familiar with and fond of. However, the virtual nature of the interaction doesn't make it any less real. We may be getting to know people differently and sharing with them differently but something important is happening here.

And then, of course, there's information overload. According to New Scientist, if you're being bombarded by all social information, then you might as well be stoned. In an article entitled, Info-mania dents IQ more than marijuana, Will Wright reported that, according to UK research, "the relentless influx of emails, cellphone calls and instant messages received by modern workers can reduce their IQ by more than smoking marijuana". Alarmingly, the average IQ was reduced by 10 points; double the amount seen in studies involving cannabis users.

Personally, I agree with Dave Weinberger's take on this information bombardment. He says: "it helps that the volume of flow is so impossibly high that there's zero expectation that anyone is keeping up. 'Hey dude, what?! didn't you know that? I like, twittered it two days ago' is just not a reasonable complaint". Or as Johnny Moore says,

"It’s not about being poked and prodded, it’s about exposing more surface area for others to connect with".

So, all of this is leading us to the 'why bother?' of ambient intimacy. Why do we bother participating in this kind of communication with others and why do we bother to keep track of others in our social network, or even have a social network at all? The following is a list that I first saw in Tom Coates' excellent presentation on social software. It shows four key reasons why people participate in on-line communities. I think it's pretty self explanatory and it works really well when you think about why we've participated in methods of communicating with each other, right from back when we were picking fleas, through to now, when we check our phones for messages from Twitter:

1. anticipated reciprocity

2. reputation

3. sense of efficacy

4. identification with a group

Peter Kollock in The Economies of Online Cooperation, via Tom Coates

This fits a lot better to me than other explanations that I've heard which tend to be either, "you have too much time on your hands" or, "you're totally egotistical to think the world wants to know what you had for breakfast". Both in personal and business settings, this list represents great incentives for participating in ambient intimacy: getting value back from your network, increasing your reputation (and thereby, perhaps your access to better, more exciting opportunities), getting things done more effectively, and, one not to be underestimated, having a crowd to run with.

So, although the question may be "what are you doing?" and that sounds simple enough, know that there is much more going on here than just a status update: it's a whole new way of being connected and its power should not be underestimated.



This article was written for receiver.

Contact: Leisa Reichelt