Ambient Awareness

This week in class, we talked about ambient awareness. Ambient awareness is defined as, in academic tradition, distributed cognition. Distributed cognition is a hybrid approach to studying all aspects of cognition, from a cognitive, social, and organizational perspective. The most well known level of analysis is to account for the complex socially distributed cognitive activities, of which a diversity of technological artifacts and other tools and representations are an indispensable part of.

One example we used in class was a three-layer naval bridge:

-The first layer: Crew Member - Artifact
-The second layer: Crew Member - Crew Member
-The third layer: Captain - Crew Members

This is a representation of how information is always traveling anywhere and everywhere. There is inter-relatedness among people and artifacts, where information is distributed and transferred. We get our information from artifacts and spread the word to cause information to rapidly grow and spread.

Further examples include one with planes and cockpits. On planes, they redesigned specific instruments in the cockpit. Once before, anyone could see the information, and after the change, only the captain could. This had a negative impact after it was reveled that pilots could still reference the instruments even though they aren't used very often. This proves that people make more thoughtful decision s when they are socially exposed.

Another example of how distribute cognition has changed technology is with social networking and software. With computer information technology, it used to be one person to a machine, and that was it. Nowadays, people use their machines to socially interact with many others who are behind their personal computer screens.  Social Networking Sites, or SNS, shares information on the user with many other users. Before, software interfaces were for only 1 specific user, but now it serves multiple users simultaneously and helps them coordinate one another.

With forms of communication such as email or texting, it is all asynchronous. The sender of an email doesn't know the current social status of the receiver. They could be sitting at their computer screen, anxiously waiting for that email or they could be out and about playing baseball or shopping at the mall, not focusing on the email conversation. In class, we discussed how technology is changing the way we communicate with one another. Email conversing is demanding. Especially in the workplace, people who communicate via email will be wondering "hey, did you get my email yet?" or "why haven't you responded to my email?" because they don't know the social status of the recipient. Once again, it's not like they are always eagerly awaiting that inbox to fill with a new message, having nothing better to do than to reply. Sometimes, as we discussed in class, we are overwhelmed with emails and end up deleting massive amounts of them without reading any, which could cause us to delete important emails. And what is our way out of it? To simply blame the technology... "oh, I didn't get that email, that's why I didn't respond." With other forms of online communication, such as Twitter, it's not as demanding and there is no pressure to respond to a twitter mention as soon as possible. If you don't read your tweets, they won't sit there on your feed waiting for you to reply, they'll move along with the other tweets from all of the people you follow. Twitter and Facebook are new communication outlets and do not demand your attention like earlier technological communication tools.