There are a few phrases , such as "ambient awareness", "infinite proximity", "hyper-connectivity", and"distributed co-presence", that define the concept I'm writing about, but my professor Dr. Burton tipped me of to a new one today that has promising connotations-ambient intimacy, which is the idea that technology makes it possible to have levels of intimacy in relationships that "you wouldn't usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible." This hearkens back to my thesis about how technology has made the metaphysical become physical, and gives concrete evidence for it (which is great). I found an interesting slide show by Leisa Reichelt (note her bio) that not only talks about ambient intimacy, but about all of the different phrases that are used in connection with it that mean essentially the same thing.
Ambient Intimacy
View more presentations from leisa reichelt.
This slideshow is great and I think it creates a really fascinating image, but the problem, of course, is that there's no dialogue accompanying it, and all of the comments are at least three years old. As I'm trying to find events that relate to my topic, I'm continually running into this same problem. Everything has already happened. All of the hype about ambient intimacy and inter-connectedness and online relationships seems to have hit a peak about five years ago. This makes it difficult for me to find real-time events to blog about, but I think that it ultimately proves my point better than any upcoming conference could. Basically, all of the talk about ambient intimacy isn't just hype anymore. As the internet has taken off and become ingrained in society, these theories about how it impacts relationships have become a reality. (Could we say that's kind of like how metaphysical ideals have become a reality, just for kicks?) In a society of digital natives, ambient intimacy is just the way it is.
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