Leisa Reichelt on Ambient Exposure

Link: disambiguity - � Ambient Exposure.

All of these changes in the past year have gotten me to thinking about something that I’m going to call Ambient Exposure. Exposure in terms of disclosing information of course, but also exposure in the way that a trader might think of it - a vulnerability, a risk associated with taking a position that could, potentially, result in loss or harm.

There are two key attributes of social tools social tools such as Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook and others that means that Ambient Intimacy leads to Ambient Exposure being the content you are sharing and the contacts with whom you are sharing it.

Ambient Intimacy occurs as you share your presence information and other personal information with people in your contact list - that is simple enough, and on the surface the exposure is obvious. However, for very many of us, we have taken little care in managing and really understanding exactly *who* is on our contact list. As your friends or followers list becomes progressively larger, we are less able to remember exactly who is listening - employers? colleagues? people we want to impress professionally? clients we’re currently working for? people we’d like to work for later? (just to focus on the professional aspect - there are a million potential personal minefields).

Essentially, we may not *want* to have the same level of intimacy with some people as we do with others … but do our social tools support this in helping us either be more thoughtful about who we add to our networks and who we don’t (and allowing ‘not adding’ in a way that is polite), or in allowing us to maintain awareness of who we are talking to (what kinds of people) and to isolate groups of people for various types of communication.

My Twitter account, for example, is completely public and there are lots of people ‘listening’ to what I twitter who I don’t know. There are so many of them that I can’t remember who is there or not. As this list has gotten longer I find myself Twittering more cautiously and self consciously. I don’t want to be twittering about procrastinating on a project when the client for whom I am working is ‘listening’. My FaceBook friends list, on the other hand, is more private and has a much smaller collection of people who I actually know. I feel much more comfortable sharing personal information in this space now - so even as the rest of the world seems to be moving away from FaceBook, I actually enjoy it more than ever because my exposure is reduced and my ability to be authentic is increased. (Which raises a whole other question about what is authenticity in this space, and how much authenticity is required for proper ‘intimacy’ to be sustained. A whole other blog post, that is…).

In the same way that we are not necessarily good at or able to forecast the impact of choosing to add someone to our contact list, we are similarly perhaps not good at anticipating the impact of sharing particular types of information with others.

For some reason, I felt incredibly reticent about sharing in a social space anything about what felt like the incredibly personal experience of being pregnant and having a baby. I’m quite open about it in my relatively protected FaceBook environment, but in my highly exposed and less personal Twitter and blogging spaces I’ve been a lot more restrained.