Ambient Awareness

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. [...long snip...] But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. [...] 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.

Thompson, Clive. “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy.” New York Times (5 Sep 2008).

I often wonder if anyone is using Twitter as a narrative project. Twitter fiction? Make a character and play out their everyday banalities. One might draw some connections to James Kolchalka’s American Elf work. Two April’s ago I wrote about the second volume of that series:

American Elf is notable for what it does leave out: almost any reference to the repetitious moments of life, to the everyday. Kolchalka is so good at the exceptional that the sense of repetition, banality, and time of the everyday is lost. While this does make for a diary strip that is probably more interesting to read at a one strip at a time pace, as an aggregated collection one realizes how little the diary represents life as it is lived. The exceptional moments displayed are shorn of any connecting time; they exist as fragments of a life. Each strip is a punctuated moment that often stands outside any real contextual bearing to the strips that precede or follow it, almost a collage where the disparate parts join to form a whole that appears as a unity.

Tags: comic_strips, everyday, new media, social media

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