Enhancing the awareness for connectedness via intuitional presentation of communication

As information technology progresses, our daily lives are getting “connected” more and more. However at the same time, it is getting harder to deal with too much increased “connectedness”. As a consequence, our awareness of communication and its effectiveness seems to be decreasing relatively. This situation leads us to introduce a new environment for “connectedness awareness”, which aims at enhancing our awareness of connectedness and communication. In this paper, we describe two tools for this environment. The first one is a visualization tool for communication media that provides feedback on the user´s communication activity; it is supposed to enhance the awareness of communication. The second tool is a simple, intuitive, interactive medium that exchanges the status of users; it might be useful in networked communities, in which such information tends to be missing