From Leo to “Ambient Intimacy”. Honouring David Caminer
by Jenny Ambrozek
Offices without people sitting at computers are unimaginable today but it was not so 60 years ago. Under the title: “Tea-shop Boffin who pioneered business computing” the June 28 Financial Times obituary of David Caminer 1915-2008 reminds us:
“ A more incongruous sight would be hard to imagine, particularly in 1951. There, at the heart of a vast catering empire devoted to tea and cakes, was a pulsing sci-fi monster with endless rows of tubes filled with half a ton of mercury. The monster’s name was Leo. It was the world’s first business computer and its master, David Caminer, who has died at the age of 93, was one of the great pioneers of commercial computing.”
Leo and it’s master seemed very far away the July 4 weekend as I followed a Twitter conversation about “ambient intimacy” begun by Mastermark who Tweeted:
mastermark On OSX, with Adium, that even comes with Growl notification windows, so the full ambient intimacy program is in effect.
For those unacquainted with “ambient intimacy” the term is attributed to Leisa Reichelt and dates to a March 1, 2007 blog post that explains:
“I’ve been using a term to describe my experience of Twitter (and also Flickr and reading blog posts and Upcoming). I call it Ambient Intimacy.
Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight.”
Mastermark on Twitter, Mark Masterson in the real world, is an obviously seriously talented and thoughtful software architect, whose reading interests range from Bertrand Russell to Kurt Gödel. If I understand correctly, Mark used the term “ambient intimacy’ in the context of implementing Identi.ca, the emerging open sources challenger to Twitter, to ensure signals from all his social networks were ambiently present. Mastermark’s blog post describing his effort is recommended reading.
From Leo to Mastermark enabling Identi.ca to maximize ambient intimacy, I couldn’t help but wonder where to from here? If the demo pavilion at the recent Enterprise 2.0 Boston is any indicator established and new enterprise platform providers have their programmers very engaged inserting “social network” functionality. However, how will the availability of “ambient intimacy” change, or not, the nature of work and organizations?
Whether you are a Twitter enthusiast, opponent, or observer, your insights please.
~ Jenny Ambrozek
Having said that, to be fair to Leisa, she’s defined the term “ambient intimacy” to mean a fairly broad idea (as the quote you show makes plain). What I was really talking about, almost everywhere I used the term, was one of the requirements for it (for me) — namely, that the “stream” of information be as unobtrusive as possible. That’s a key usability aspect. Not everybody has the same thresholds for that — many people are happy and content with manually polling a web interface (and the associated task switching), but I find that distracting and annoying. So, my statement should probably have been something like (again, to fair to Leisa, methinks) “In order to achieve the benefits of what’s described as ambient intimacy, I’m one of those people that prefers to have the stream popping up in a semi-transparent window, off to one unobtrusive side of my screen”.
