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 remember commenting, likely around 2016 about the use of Hypothes.is' counter on their bookmarklet to indicate the number of annotations on a particular page. This is a more passive sort of indicator of presence.

I used to get a little thrill to see people who'd either been there at the same time, or just before me.

It's also reminiscent of Vannevar Bush's "associative trails" in As We May Think (The Atlantic, 1945).