While shopping at the grocery store recently and wearing Google Glass, I got an incoming social media alert referring to a phrase used by the Pew Research Center: "ambient news."
Wait, what the heck is ambient news?
Pew uses that phrase to characterize the experience of getting news in social streams, especially on the social sites Reddit, Twitter and Facebook.
People are increasingly getting their news as part of their social networking activity. This replaces an older model of "news time," where someone would sit down to read the newspaper or watch the evening news.
"Ambient news" means that news information just appears, scrolls by and then vanishes, mostly in the cognitive background.
I had to laugh at the incoming alert, because (thanks to Google Glass), the news about ambient news was itself ambient -- floating in space over the frozen foods section.
The experience got me thinking about the future. It's clear that mobile notifications, wearable computing, preemptive search, the Internet of things and location-based commerce are all conspiring to make everything ambient. Not just news.
People talk a lot about "context" -- the idea that information available to us will constantly change based on where we are and what we're doing. But the term "context" looks at technology from the industry's point of view. It's how providers of location-based information think about how, when and where to serve up information.
But from the user's point of view, the core attribute of this contextual information will be "ambience." It will just be there with us all the time.
Location-based information doesn't "feel" like context. The person receiving that information doesn't think "Oh, OK. This makes sense given my context." It "feels" like certain types of information exist in physical places.
I'll dig into that idea more, but first let's explore the "ambient" concept.
What does ambient mean, really?
Something is ambient when it is or appears to be part of your environment or surroundings.
Ambient is used in a variety of contexts. For example, there's "ambient music," which is both a style of music and also a description for music's potential role in human attention.
When you're at a concert, everybody is paying attention to the music -- that's not ambient music. But if you're at, say, a cocktail party, the music is usually ambient: You might pay attention to it, you might not. It's there, but it's in the background.
In a digital information context, ambience will be brought about by the convergence of multiple trends, including the following:
1. Mobile notifications. Notifications are about to become far more prominent in our lives. If you look at the notifications as they appear in, say, Google's Android KitKat or Apple's iOS 7, you can see that they just keep getting better, more informative and more relevant. Apps will increasingly feed notifications, and these will become increasingly location-based. The combination of constancy and location-awareness will make notifications on smartphones feel ambient, as if they're being harvested out of the air.
2. Wearable computing. As I experienced with Google Glass in the grocery store, notifications and other incoming information will appear to float in the air. This ambient feeling is strengthened by Glass apps that provide contextual information. For example, I use a Google app called Field Trip, which sends me alerts related to my current location. For example, I walked across an overpass recently, and a short article popped up in Google Glass telling me that the bridge was originally built in 1906 and other bits of information. It felt like that information lives on the bridge, and that Glass is some kind of magic eyewear that can see what's floating in the air there. Magic wristwatches will have the same uncanny power to harvest knowledge out of the air.
3. Preemptive search. Google Now, Siri and other services that are cropping up will seek to answer our questions before we ask them. More importantly, the interface to these virtual assistants will be mostly voice -- we'll talk to them, they'll talk to us. Because they'll exist in all our spaces -- in our wristwatches, phones, laptops, PCs, cars and homes -- we'll have the luxury of not caring which device is delivering the assistant. We'll talk to the air and the air will talk back. It will feel especially ambient when the trigger for these preemptive search services is our location or context. For example, we'll get in the car, and Google Now will eagerly guess (based on the fact that we're in the car and the time of day) where we're going. We'll walk in the house, and that will trigger reminders we've asked to receive when we get home. As we drive by the dry cleaners, Siri will remind us to pick up our clothes. Virtual assistants will be everywhere and all around us.