Ambient intimacy

[denny]

From an article linked by dryad_wombat:

I’ve been using a term to describe my experience of Twitter (and also Flickr and reading blog posts and Upcoming). I call it Ambient Intimacy.

Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible.

I've been worrying quite a bit lately about how many good friends I have these days. Not the greatest of hardships, I realise :) but it means that these days I can't spend enough quality time with all the people I'd like to spend lots of quality time with. It's frustrating - I worry that they won't realise how much they mean to me if I don't spend enough time with them. Also, of course, they're wonderful people and I want to spend more time with them, so not being able to is annoying for purely selfish reasons.

I've been working on the theory that they're all stuck in pretty much the same boat, and so what's holding our friendships together at a higher level than would seem possible if you measure our face-to-face time is that we all know we're doing our best to see each other as much as we can... but actually, almost all of us are on LJ, facebook, etc etc... maybe we're benefiting from ambient intimacy?


In other news, last night at 03:45 my phones both started ringing, and the landline got called back every ten minutes. I finally got up and looked at the incoming number when they rang back a third time on my landline, didn't recognise it, pulled the wire and went back to bed. 10 minutes after that, I realised it was the company that monitors the alarm system at work.

So, I get out of bed and drive to work in the pouring rain. The office has lost power for some reason (rest of the block is fine) and that's set the alarm into some kind of 'mildly aggravated' mode. Not really worth getting up for, but I suppose theoretically it could have been someone cutting the power prior to breaking in. So I poked around for a while, then came home again around half four. Driving wakes me up (as soon as I get behind the wheel - I've always thought of this as a Good Thing :) ), so I had to read for an hour before I could get back to sleep.

Tired now.

Comments

[cokephreak.livejournal.com]

Ambient intimacy is better than nothing, but really is no substitute for the real thing

Some things I have trouble expressing in properly intimate 1 on 1 situations. I have no hope of trying to get these things across on a broadcast medium

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm thinking it probably just pads the gaps out between real interactions, and keeps things ticking over at a higher level than they would otherwise.

I attempted to email you and K a couple of days ago re: Pirates - did it get there, and are you interested or have you already seen it?

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Yesterday even. Getting up at 4am obviously did wonders for my time-sense.

[mr_magicfingers]

Given that I lived abroad for so many years, ambient intimacy was my only connection with a lot of people. It allowed me to keep friendships and stay in touch with people I might have found it hard to do any other way. That said, my friends tend not to need regular contact. Earlier this year one of my closest friends, who I hadn't seen in 4.5 years came to visit and it was as though none of that time has passed, we carried on exactly the way we always have, which is a great comfort.

We never seem to have enough time to spend with the ones we love, so we spend the time we can. Anyone else who can't deal with that isn't really a friend in my book.

You have many friends who think very highly of you, we take the time you have to offer and are thankful of it. I wouldn't worry too much.

x

[ravenselene.livejournal.com]

Yuck. Getting up to drive to work in the rain at 3.45 am. That sucks.