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Ambient Co-presence

maggieappleton.com · 1,629 words · saved by 7 readers

You and I are currently in an asynchronous exchange. I've written these words in the past. You're reading them at a point in the future. We are not in sync. Despite being on the same website – which suggests a shared digital space – it bears very little resemblance to how we might interact in a shared physical space in real-time. We currently have no visual, audible, tactile, spatial, or embodied awareness of one another. We also have no awareness of the other people reading this post, even if they're doing it at the exact same moment. For a long time, the asynchronous nature of the web was a technical limitation. Internet speeds and bandwidth simply couldn't accommodate anything beyond sending reams of static text to one another with long, slow lags in between. But things have progressed. We now take for granted that our web connections refresh every few milliseconds. We experience most of it in real-time; spicy Twitter drama, collaborative editing in Google docs, overcrowded Zoom mee

The Context It’s hard to create a subtle sense of shared, synchronous space among multiple people on the web. You and I are currently in an a synchronous exchange. I’ve written these words in the past. You’re reading them at a point in the future. We are not in sync. Despite being on the same web site – which suggests a shared digital space – it bears very little resemblance to how we might interact in a shared physical space in real-time. We currently have no visual, audible, tactile, spatial, or embodied awareness of one another. We also have no awareness of the other people reading this pos

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