Ambient Co-presence<br /> by [[Maggie Appleton]] @maggieappleton<br /> accessed on 2026-11-14T22:48:35

as of 2026-11-14 search for "ambient co-presence" primarily brings up this article and little else beyond Mirca Madianou's 2016 paper in Global Networks.

What is it's relationship to body doubling? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_doubling

I'm reminded of some of Kevin Marks' work on phatic communication on the web here as well as Amber Case's early calm technology work tangential to the IndieWeb.

I wish I could recall the name of the stand up comedian in the early 2000s (HBO special?) who mentioned that two dudes could sit on a couch together watching sports or a movie and say absolutely nothing to each other and that was considered bonding. It was the presence that mattered far more than any communication. The same comedian noted that the same thing typically didn't apply to women who required explicit verbal communication for bonding with each other.

I'm also reminded of the use of webmentions to show highlights and comments/notes on individual sections of someone's site. In particular, Kartik Prabhu's implementation of fragmention.

Appleton uses the idea of "creating trails" which is similar to V. Bush's 1945 work.

Perhaps social online tracking apparatus could also leave pointers which indicate which article a friend had read either before or after the current one, especially when those articles were related?

In academia, could one use meshes of links between referenced papers to rank or order more explicit paths through academic literature based on citation weights?

second life used to create this sort of third space and social presence for some in the early 2000s