Be Aware: Ambient Awareness

The main argument in “A Brave New World of Digital Intimacy” is about how Facebook and other social media websites can create a multitude of relationships among users. Mark Zuckerberg created the news feed to keep users updated with their friends and family members over Facebook. The news feed provides the most recent information that involves you, your friends or acquaintances. I believe that this definitely shortens our attention span, because right when we log on to the computer or click the app on our phone we are immediately exposed to social media. It is instant access, therefore we look and read data for a quick five minutes and then we lock our phones, or turn off our computers. I always enjoy the scrolling and the “quick data” kind of deal, but I do understand that it is probably not the best thing for literacy. We don’t read or analyze or dig deeper into anything, it is a quick scan and then we are finished.. until the next hour. The article refers to “ambient awareness” as being able to notice someone’s mood through his or her body language. I definitely do some cyber stalking myself sometimes, and if I see someone that I have never spoken to or met sometimes I will feel like I know them through looking through pictures or reading something they’ve posted. I feel as if I’ve got a good grip on who he or she is in reality, but truly I don’t. I do think there is a downfall to ambient awareness; you do not take the time to actually get to know someone, or ask someone about his or her day or their life for that matter because you feel like you already have a good idea of what is going on. Ambient awareness is slowly shutting out personal relationships with actual physical contact. An ambient update is an immediate update taken from social media. An example would be if you were sitting on your computer and your friend immediately posted something about her new baby brother or the amount of money he or she raised in a charity event. It keeps us closer to social media. The class discussions we have had on literacy often involve the connection to no analyzing and no deep structure digging, but only surface work. We are a people who are slowly being conformed into a life of slightly reading things… we skim; we read through it all so quickly, and forget that a deeper meaning exists. People in their 20’s feel pressured to stay connected to Facebook and other social media websites because they have to be on their A game for something that could be posted about them, or involve them in anyway. Things are posted constantly all throughout the hours.. constantly. I feel like this article follows very close behind the Gin article. I think it is an alert, notifying us to just be careful not to get sucked into a life of skimming and flipping without much involvement in digging deeper. We are being warned not to follow too closely behind cyber relationships and instant access.