Typically, I blather on here about subjects on which I have fairly strong opinions. Really. I can hear your shock. But I’ve been thinking lately about awareness, my thoughts rattling around after reading about the brave new world of Facebook and Twitter et al. (I’m clearly not the only one sent a-twitter about it, which is interesting.) It’s a great article, and it comes right on the heels of my (dare I say, prescient?) attempt to strike open a conversation on the subject with Pam’s help.

I suppose the wording of my question was a bit too blatantly one-sided to be fair. But for me, it’s an honest perception that there’s a limit to the usefulness of these tools. The problem is not about what these social networking tools provide, but rather in how many social networks there are. Every month, it seems, there’s another niche group served by yet another service. While this seems perfectly obvious and natural, it perpetuates the splintering of society into ever smaller fragments. While we devote a certain amount of time to our networks, strengthening and developing relationships with complete strangers as often as not, if our real-world friends don’t participate or move in different online circles, we risk losing those connections.

Take online chat, for example. There are something like 20 different IM programs and protocols, all with vast user bases that most likely have only some degree of overlap. But where they don’t is a pretty huge disconnect. I imagine most people tend to use only one, maybe two different IMs, so how many of their friends are they not connected to? Maybe it isn’t an issue in the younger generation, but I have to wonder how divided we can really be. At what point do we reach diminishing returns, in time spent hopping around various networks versus the tangible value gained from all that attentiveness?

Certainly, this is something that is different for everyone. And that’s what has gotten me mulling lately. In the article, Clive Thompson discusses the phenomenon of ambient awareness. While focused on the phenomenon of technology-assisted awareness of other people’s doings, it can be seen as a novel description of social living, period. Life in a community requires this kind of awareness of each other. Lack of it is, in fact, one of my major frustrations with some groups.

But I also know that I’m fully culpable, here. My own behavior online gives me a clue that despite my protestations, I’m not very good at either monitoring or maintaining ambient awareness. I check updates rarely, and I almost never provide updates. My own weakness here certainly informs my opinion about the usefulness of the entire phenomenon. And I do know that I’m far from alone in this.

Which is what leads me to think that maybe awareness is another kind of intelligence, or another sliding scale along which people have greatly varying abilities. Situational awareness is an obvious counterpoint, and anyone who drives in Boston can attest to the wide variability in people’s ability to know what’s going on around them. And situational awareness can be trained and developed, but I suspect that some people simply can never reach the level of attentiveness to their environment that a hotshot athlete brings to the game.

Is it the same with ambient awareness? Am I simply not graced with the capacity for life on Twitter and Facebook and you name it else? What does this mean for society at large? Will we have yet another split among those who have online connectability and those who have-not?

(These aren’t rhetorical questions - dive in!)

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