Can intimacy be a many-to-many experience? Can it be disembodied? Can it be encoded into software? Can it be airborne?
Suw Charman offers a fuzz-bomb of a post on “ambient intimacy,” channeling (apparently) a presentation on the idea by Lisa Reichelt at the Future of Web Apps conference in London:
Twitter or Jaiku, use to pick each others’ fleas en masse. Gives phatic expressiveness to a virtual space … David Weinberger “continual partial friendship” … your app has to be undemanding, but at the same time it does need to be intrusive enough that they are able to pay attention to it, it can’t just ben an app that is installed and forgotten about. Needs to be more like the old-fashioned village green, so you walk through the village green on way to do something else, but on the way will bum pinto people. So needs to support hte people that you see, that your’e waaving to, but without getitng in the way of what you need to get done.
This is a meme in utero, struggling to be born.
Across the universe, Tim Bray is feeling it, “the ambient Internet human buzz”:
It feels pleasant to step into my local on the way to the office (double latte in my own cup). Yeah, it’s warm when cold outside, shady when sunny, smells of coffee and baking. But that’s background; what matters is the faces I recognize and others I don’t, and always, always, the buzz of conversation. That’s what the Net’s starting to feel like.
“That’s background”: the old Cartesian dream. As if intimacy were a trick of the mind, which perhaps it is. We shout into cyberspace and, like any echoing void, it returns our “own love back in copy speech.” A sense, anyway, of intimacy.
I’m been using Twitter for a while, and it feels a little bit like being in a class: you don’t like all the people the same, neither do everyone in your list care all about one another. Some catch information silently, and come back with it later; some see things about you or your relatives. It is very useful for me, because I work at two different places — but I doubt this will bring a new feelings to member of a large family, for instance; it just bridges distance.
Note: I avoided an American (or coed for that sake) education, so I avoided all the popularity context by the drama-queens you might imagine.
This intimacy you speak of is familiarity, which is only a small part of intimacy. It is moreover, the familiarity of place, not of persons. Very little on the web gives us the other types of intimacy. This is because the web has largely focused on choice, and in so doing has created shortages of many valuable human things:
http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2007/10/07/the-biggest-thing-the-web-brings-is-choice-what-does-choice-make-scarce/
Figuring out how to deliver some of those things on the web is much more valuable than offering any more choice.