“Ambient awareness” and social networking vs privacy
Posted by: Xeeban in Computers / Internet, tags: ambient awareness, facebook, privacy, social networking, twitterRecently a friend of mine mentioned that she was concerned about the popularity of social networking and how that related to privacy. Many people are now accustomed to putting all sorts of personal information online and sharing it so that anyone can see it without a second thought as to how that data can be used or abused. True, the potential for abuse is there, but there is also something very compelling about entering frequent status updates on Facebook or “tweets” on Twitter. I always wondered why it was so addictive, and why people stopped worrying about privacy issues and posted with abandon. On the other hand, I never really understood Twitter and why people would post all sorts of little updates on very mundane topics like what they were eating for breakfast. I figured I was just too old to understand.
This New York Times article that I found today from September 2008 seems to answer that question. A quote from that article mentions “ambient awareness: and how it works with something like Twitter:
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.
So bit by bit, we get to live side by side with people that may be separated by thousands of miles. It brings people closer together by allowing the sharing of their lives. And I think this is a good thing. I’ve given Twitter a deeper look and started using it on a regular basis. I found a core set of friends to follow and who in turn followed me. After a while, it became strangely addictive. Comforting, even.
Back in the ancient days of pre-internet online communities, there were people that would come together on bulletin board systems that you would have to dial up and connect to with a slow modem. Once you fought your way past the busy signals and actually got on, you could read and post messages. It was very primitive compared today’s tools and technology, but surprisingly the sense of community was very strong. People spent a lot of time cultivating their online personas and many friendships were born in the midst of text messages being posted and read at 300 baud.
When the Internet started to come of age, dial-up bulletin board systems became obsolete: replaced by online forums, chat rooms, instant messaging, blogs, search engines and a myriad of web 1.0 goodness. But something was always missing for me. A sense of belonging never seemed to blossom in this new, fast colorful place we called the world wide web. It was at the same time both amazing and feature-rich, and yet diminished for lack of strong community. It was shiny and neon, like night time in Shinjuku, but too much anonymity allowed people to hide behind the safety of their web browser, and the tone and character of my online experience changed dramatically from comfort food to junk food.
Now the pendulum is swinging back the other way. Through services like Facebook or Twitter, people are able to reconnect with friends and through “ambient awareness” that feeling of community is being reborn… But in a totally new and wonderful way. I am totally intrigued by this and wait with baited breath for how this will all evolve.
So is all this worth the sacrifice of personal privacy? Time will tell. But so far, it is looking like the pluses far outweigh the minuses.
A keyboard for the Uber Geek. This is a totally black computer keyboard with nothing at all on the keys. The keys are all blank! The whole thing looks like some stealth ninja keyboard.
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