"Ambient Intimacy" and Media as Interaction

I recently read an article by Clive Thomson in The Hareld Tribune with the headline "Web Ushers in Age of Ambient Intimacy". I thought it was a fantastic peek into the new cultures of online communication using new media tools such as Twitter and Facebook, both apart of a rapidly expanding universe of websites created almost solely for the purpose of documenting the things you want to share about yourself and those in your life, and sharing that information with the rest of that network, and not unreasonably the rest of the world. This kind of communication has created such a unique realm of emotions, that come with with sharing personal information and constantly enveloping oneself in the online lives of other users, that psychologists have given it (one aspect of these type of interactions) an appropriate term: Ambient Intimacy". I say it is appropriate, because it describes a feeling of closeness between people that may not ever meet in person and, as an interviewee says in his article, "It drags you out of your own head" when one feels the need to tell online friends how they are feeling at any moment, and this can conjure up emotions of intimacy with humanity in general, much like a person hallucinating on LSD can feel extremely insignificant, loved, understood, and intimate with the universe all at the same time.

Casey Man Kong Lum explains in "An Overview of Media Ecology" that this dynamic array of emotions that come with constantly saturating oneself with the personal thoughts of others comes from and is perpetuated by the environment of certain media and the media of a given environment. That is, the behavior of people in any environment is heavily influenced by the constraints of the media they are using, both in that there are technological boundaries and cultural boundaries that define our behavior and perceptions, and internet interaction is no exception to this rule. Internet media tools have been superimposed onto the web, created in the image of already existing social structures in the physical world, and they have also been created as an adaptation to their natural evolution after being integrated into the web. That is, it is obvious when looking at the kinds of media tools on the internet, such as Facebook, that they originally had some place in the pre-internet world, and functioned in that context, morphing into new forms and adapting to culture change as the years went by. It is also apparent that once these tools were put online, humanity naturally morphed to adapt to this new media and fulfill it's natural desires, and as always, changed these tools again to further their adaptation. And so, this is a way of understanding how media, which comes from a human need or desire and is made in some particular context/s, changes culture, which in turn changes the media again continuously. Something very important for us to understand is that an exponential growth of communication technology has occurred throughout human history, as Lum pointed out, and everything humans have developed in the past few decades has absolutely dwarfed every other media we have created in the thousands of years of human technological evolution.