So I was flipping through (is that the right phrase?) blogs today, and I came across an interesting discussion of this thing called Ambient Intimacy. I like this idea, I think--it seems to be a sort of corrective to the scary/gigantic/randomness of the Internet... Reconnecting with old friends via Myspace (I recently met the ten year old daughter of my best friend in elementary school--she and I lost touch after she got married, and I missed her. Meeting the kid was icing on the cake), playing poker and chess with friends who live a thousand miles away, checking out recent pictures and sending your own to friends and family, following the lives of distant acquaintances (especially some really smart folks I've met at school and conferences) are all mainfestations of this turn.
Of course, I do have to mention the simulational aspects of such a mediated intimacy--there are several layers to these online connections that could stand some intimate investigation of their own.
But, for now, I like the idea of these connections. Especially considering the upcoming sea changes I and many of my newly hired buddies are going to experience in the next few months. It's comforting to know that I can still see their sweet faces and learn about their adventures when we are living thousands of miles away from each other. We can maintain, if we work at it, some semblance of daily interaction with one another, so we won't, ideally, have to reconnect ten years down the road.
2 comments:
Of course, there's the Derridean question as to how much "real" intimacy is always already mediated by simulation... Though Baudrillard says as much, more sociologically, and Lacan, of course, though for somewhat different reasons...
Yeah, but there's just so MUCH of it in this notion--and there's so Little consideration of importance, or revelation. Used to be, I thought of intimate friends as the people with whom I could share, well, intimate things. There were considerations of etiquette and compunction. But now, I could send you pictures of me eating a tuna melt, and going to Barton Springs, and buying a pair of shoes. We can text each other, constantly, the daily, banal details of our lives... And we can be distracted by the constant texts and photos being sent by all the other people that we know. I mean, how often in the past have people seriously considered the number of friends that they could manage? It used to be numbers, the limit I always heard was 10, hence the 10-digit phone number.
It's like the opposite of poetry, the middle management of simulation. Now we are concerned with the intimacy limits of these friendships. Instead of "Real" it's like "Empirically motivated": How many people can you honestly be intimate with--mediated or non-mediated? What's the quota, and what are the standards of evaluation? That's a whole lotta intimate measurement, right there...
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