The Juggler’s Paradox: how the OpenSocial Activity Stream facilitates “ambient communication”
One of the three legs of OpenSocial (other than profiles and friends) is the activity stream, which is implemented as a “News Feed” and “Mini-Feed” in Facebook. The inclusion of the activity stream in the first release of OpenSocial is highly significant, because the activity stream may well be as disruptive a technology as email.
Why? Two reasons:
(1) We need to deal with the growing need for continuous partial attention. Being highly connected to a network of collaborators who depend on our timely response to critical events, we will need to spend more and more time scanning the horizon, and less time being soley focused on the work at hand. Stowe Boyd puts it like this: “We need to revert back to pre-agricultural/pre-industrial consciousness : one eye on the flint we are knapping, and one eye scanning the savannah for predators and prey, chatting the whole time.”
(2) Personal productivity is now less important than remaining connected to those most important to us, because the productivity of our network is more important than the specific piece of work in our lap.
So how does this relate to the activity stream? The activity stream is an excellent way to implement the concept of “continuous partial attention”. If everything that matters to you (virtually) is flowing in the activity stream (what your friends are doing, what tasks need to be done, what events are coming up) , you can easily ignore things that don’t look threatening or critical, but deal with things that need immediate attention. So the activity stream provides you with the ability to both stay connected and to be continually aware of things that you need to deal with.
The beauty of the activity stream is that it is ambient - you don’t need to directly focus on it. Boyd uses juggling as a way to describe this - jugglers don’t focus on the balls, the movements, or timing. “They unfocus: it is a field of all three dimensions and their attention is distributed. Good jugglers can also sing or tell jokes while juggling.” So the idea is you can do your job while at the same time communicate and remain aware of what is going on around you.
The concept of “ambient communication” is an interesting way of looking at this. Ambient communication has 2 key characteristics:
- It doesn’t push (i.e. it doesn’t interrupt) like email, IM or phone.
- It doesn’t require pull (i.e. you don’t have find it).
Ambient communication is “>glanceable“. It doesn’t interrupt you, and you don’t have to go look for it. It’s just there, and you can pay as much or as little attention to it as you want. If the implementation is intelligent, it can provide clues that can help you determine what is important and what is not - a critical error or request that appears in your activity stream could appear in red and start flashing, for example.
>(Source: www.ambientdevices.com)>
Ambient communication as embodied in an activity stream meets the key needs of :
- paying continuous (but partial) attention to what is going on around your (virtual) world, and
- keeping you in contact with your (virtual) network (both human and digital).
We are working on some interesting implementations of this concept. Stay tuned!
