Is there a conversational intimacy hierarchy?
OK, here’s what I mean by this:
Have you ever gotten a Facebook email that someone sent that you only discovered 3 months after the fact? I have, and I often wonder, “Did they really want to speak to me, and if so, why didn’t they call on the phone”?
But I am also guilty here, though usually with a good degree of calculation. For example, I try to think about what my goal is, what the other person is doing and how to best communicate without wasting time. While still enjoying the other person (this is important, or we’d stop phoning or having meals together).
So here goes — my list, ranked in order from Most Intimate to Least Intimate
1. Face-to-Face (this works even better if the faces are being fed food)
2. Synchronous Video Chat like Skype
3. Asynchronous Video Chat like Seesmic
3. Realistic Virtual World with Avatar that Resembles You in Real Life
4. Facebook private conversations
5. Textual Microblog Social Networks like Twitter
6. Fantasy - oriented Virtual Worlds where you do not resemble yourself
7. Social Network public conversations (not including Twitter, Pownce and other microblogging)
8. Blog Comments
9. SMS
10. ESP
What do you think?
January 12th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
I concur wholeheartedly with your choice to put face-to-face communication at the top of the list and of course you know how passionate I am about video conversation so the next two are okay by me too … I’d put direct voice-to-voice (without video) before the shifting into the wholly digital realm … I know that having an image helps any communication as humans are largely visually based creatures, but there’s something about the avatar scenario to me, that shifts conversation from real to not so real. That may of course be my own general bias against using virtual personas to communicate but you asked for people’s .02 so that’s mine.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:19 pm
esp is number one for me. what could be more intimate than transmitting and receiving with the power of your mind and imagination!
January 13th, 2009 at 11:49 am
esp is number one for me. what could be more intimate than transmitting and receiving with the power of your mind and imagination!
January 13th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
There is absolutely an intimacy hierarchy. It relates to the differentiation between what sociologists call weak and strong social ties.
January 13th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
Where would you say written chat fits in? And yeah, I’d agree that ESP would be #1, unless it’s clearly one-sided like the possession of x-ray goggles. BS.
January 15th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
There is a strange dichotomy in all things social media. There is an odd kind of intimacy in Facebook or Twitter or reading someone’s blog. Not an intimacy of communication, because of course communication is more effective when you talk to each other at the same time and best in the same space. But people’s social media activity is often very personal and revealing even though it’s also shaped to make them appear in the best light. Which is why I say dichotomy. It is two things at once. We try to make ourselves appear smart and great looking, but in those moments of Twittering when we are alone with our keyboards and can’t see the whites of the eyes of those who are listening, we sometimes hit send on things we might censor in a less virtual setting. And through platforms like Facebook, we get to see little glimpses of our business associates’ family lives and our friends’ business lifes. Everyone has a mother or a dog or a picture of their second grade class. It’s somehow humanizing. So even if you’ve just gone through a flame war with some stranger on a forum, when you see their profile picture all cuddled up with their baby, it’s hard to hate them. And that’s a strange intimacy.
But so far as communicating. Best to go for lunch.
January 18th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
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February 7th, 2009 at 6:45 am
Oh yes, there is obviously an intimacy hierarchy (and I’ve noticed you’ve left out emails and phone calls from your list!
My question is… intimacy for exactly what? If I’m interested in romantic partnerships, I’d certainly say that face-to-face comes first in intimacy, video chat next, virtual worlds next (perhaps at the same level as the phone, since you can chat in voice inside most virtual worlds too), and text-based IM (or mobile phone text messages) next.
But if the issue is “intimacy” for establishing business, I’d say there is no need for it, just a question of being good at establishing contact and keeping in touch. For almost all business, for instance, physical presence is totally unnecessary (except perhaps to hire an actor for a play or a movie; or to get healed by a doctor). Good mechanisms to make sure both parties know what they are agreeing with are far more important, and physical presence and phone calls would be at the bottom of the list for me. Virtual worlds would rank very high, email next, and probably text-based chat below that. Nobody remembers what they’ve agreed over lunch and a good bottle of wine (unless you take care to send a resumed version by email afterwards, which both parties will not agree too anyway); and getting phone calls to do things, while you’re heavilly multitasking and dealing with a dozen issues at the same time, is hardly better.
No, the question here is really “why you need intimacy for?”, and the ranking will change dramatically depending on what your purposes are.
You’ve noticed that I’ve completely ignored all the Web 2.0 social applications and kept them out of my list. Seriously, you don’t get “intimate” by dropping Plurk messages or Facebook comments or tweets to your business or your romantic partner… that’s just a delusion, created by the developers of those social web tools, to make people continue to log in to them.
I like those tools as references. It’s quite useful to look someone’s CV up on LinkedIn or even Facebook. It’s nice to know someone has a MySpace page with some music (or art) for download, so that you can remember what they are doing right now. But LinkedIn or Plaxo are just glorified extensions of your address book — you can imagine those social tools as an enhanced, collaborative address book, where people can update their contacts and references dynamically on your address book. This makes sense for business, and perhaps even to a degree for non-business relationships: the ability to keep all your contacts immediately updated at all times. But anything more than that is just wishful thinking: you really don’t get more “intimate” because someone bite you on Facebook or sent you a new video on MySpace. And you certainly won’t hire people on Facebook just because they took the “Are We Compatible” quiz.
On the other hand, hiring someone based on in-world meetings in virtual worlds happens every day.