Ambient Awareness is a term coined by social scientists used to describe a new form of peripheral social awareness. With the emergence of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms, the need and urge to feel connected and aware of others ongoings and lives is at an all time high. The awareness aspect of this term comes from the user’s omnipresent knowledge that these media outlets and applications allow one to stay constantly connected with one’s social circle, including people they would otherwise not talk to or know anything about. According to Clive Thompson of the New York Times, ambient awareness is very similar to “being physically near someone and picking up on [someone’s] mood through the little things [they] do” (1) such as body language, sighs, etc. Having your entire life shared on a social platform is much like being right next to somebody at a restaurant sharing what you did this past weekend. Instead, anyone can see via a post you would share.
This idea came about from the release of the News Feed on Facebook, where, whether you would want to or not, whatever you post, or friends post about you, it is easily shown to everybody on your friends list. At first this received a lot of backlash for there seemed to be no sense of privacy whatsoever, but soon after, our urge to feel connected and informed changed our perspective on the matter. Thompson explains how many people, particularly people over the age of 30, they did not understand this urge and need to update the world on their everyday lives. He begins to talk about Ben Haley, a 39-year-old man whose friends urged him to get a twitter account when at first he thought the whole concept of it was “silly.” At first, he would check twitter and believe that “each tweet was so brief as to be virtually meaningless.” But as days went by, he started to realize how in sync he was becoming with his friends and he found himself checking twitter multiple times an hour.
This idea of feeling connected is so important in the everyday lives of social media users, including myself. For me, my two biggest social media platforms are Instagram and Snapchat. What I see that has been happening with myself and all of my friends is that we go to insane lengths to get the perfect Instagram picture instead of actually taking in the scenery of what is actually going on around us. I am personally guilty of this every time I go sightseeing or to a new place or out with friends. We all are so obsessed with getting the perfect picture that a lot of the time we miss what is going on around us. The problem of constantly using our phones for snapchat and Instagram has gotten so out of hand that my friends and I make rules for when we go out to dinner, for example, where none of use are allowed to touch our phones for the entire meal, and if you do, you pay for the entire meal.
According to Jacob Silverman of The Guardian, there is a common saying nowadays with the “Instagram Era” titled “Pics or it didn’t happen” (2). This saying is used very commonly among Instagram and other social media platform users and the idea surrounding this saying is that if you go somewhere or you do something and you did not capture a picture, it is as if the moment never happened because you will not be able to share the post on any of your social media platforms. This saying completely shows what is wrong about the “social media problem” demonstrated through our desire to stay connected with one another. We lose our happiness to live in the moment and instead we are living through our cameras on our phones. The following Instagram post expresses this saying exactly. Here, a woman is at the Louvre in Paris with the hashtag in her caption “#picsoritdidnthappen” as she is clearly not looking at what is behind her. One can only assume how long she spent getting the “perfect shot” instead of spending that time walking and taking in the art of the museum.
I have wondered for so long what it is about social media that makes us go crazy, and a part of the answer is the ambient awareness of us wanting to feel connected in a sort of way. The comfort of knowing what is happening in the lives of our friends and family as well as boasting about our own life is a driving force for a lot of people. Having both good and bad sides, the idea of social media has definitely changed the way we engage with other people and with ourselves.
Works Cited:
- Thompson, Clive. “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy.” The New York Times, September 5, 2008. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html?_r=2.
- Silverman, Jacob. “‘Pics or It Didn’t Happen’ – the Mantra of the Instagram Era.” The Guardian. February 26, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/26/pics-or-it-didnt-happen-mantra-instagram-era-facebook-twitter.
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