Connection Café: Ambient Awareness (and You)

	Ambient Awareness (and You)
	Posted by Misty McLaughlin at Sep 16, 2008 04:54 PM CDT Categories: Constituent Empowerment, Social Media

Did anyone catch the fantastic New York Times magazine story on Digital Intimacy two weeks ago? If not, it’s highly recommended reading for anyone who wonders how to get involved in This Thing Called Web 2.0, what kinds of motivators drive people to participate in online social networks, and why you should, too. Or not.

Clive Thompson gives some important milestones in the history of Facebook, from its early traditional pull-communication days (when you had to actually get online, navigate to Facebook, and look through your friends’ pages to find out what was going on with them – Old School, isn’t it?) to the evolution of News Feed, one of the first pre-Twitter push-communication mechanisms to actually deliver updates right to your…well, at least to one centralized place, your Facebook homepage. And then to your cell phone. And now, to your iphone, thanks to Loopt, Dopplr, Tumblr, Twitter, and the like.

In a nutshell, Thompson does a recent history of the collapse of push and pull communications into one concept called “ambient awareness,” or information delivery that’s integrated into our natural environments, rather than just the silo of your computer monitor. I love that this article speaks directly to many of us doubters, who wonder what could possibly be interesting about 20 updates a day on the quotidian, by explaining the sense of the subtle, the connectedness that can come from following someone else or blasting your own updates this way (aka microblogging).

(Confession: Yes, I did just stop writing this post to update Facebook. Misty is…writing a blog post on ambient awareness.)

I also appreciate, frankly, that this article takes on the division of intimate feeds versus more public presentation – one strategy for dealing with the social annihilation that too much of a good thing (too much information from people or causes you don’t care about, people who follow you assuming that they know you through your feed) can engender.

So what’s useful for nonprofits here? Well, back to Peter’s question of a few months ago: Should your organization have a Twitter strategy? In a nutshell, if I may weigh in: probably not. Twitter is a vehicle – not the trend or the impulse itself.

But should your organization have a strategy to promote ambient awareness of who you are, the work you’re doing, and how you’re changing the world? Well, yeah. If you can do it in a way that invites connectedness, community, and participation – Save the Baby Whales is…returning a beached Beluga to the North Atlantic – you have achieved the holy grail of Web 2.0.

To get you started, I recommend The Morning News’ rules for polite ambience (framed, of course, as all about Twitter Etiquette…ah well).