Ambient Intimacy

Posted on by Leisa Reichelt

LastFM IRC

I find myself talking about Twitter quite a lot. I’m not the only one. The behaviours that Twitter has made more visible are tremendously interesting.

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. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight.

Who cares? Who wants this level of detail? Isn’t this all just annoying noise? There are certainly many people who think this, but they tend to be not so noisy themselves. It seems to me that there are lots of people for who being social is very much a ‘real life’ activity and technology is about getting stuff done.

There are a lot of us, though, who find great value in this ongoing noise. It helps us get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances. It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like.

Knowing these details creates intimacy. (It also saves a lot of time when you finally do get to catchup with these people in real life!) It’s not so much about meaning, it’s just about being in touch.

As Ian Curry at Frog Design writes:

It’s basically blogging reduced to what the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin called ‘the phatic function.’ Like saying “what’s up” as you pass someone in the hall when you have no intention of finding out what is actually up, the phatic function is communication simply to indicate that communication can occur. It made me think of the light, low-content text message circles Mizuko Ito described existing among Japanese teens – it’s not so important what gets said as that it’s nice to stay in contact with people. These light exchanges typify the kind of communication that arises among people who are saturated with other forms of communication.

I came across this research when I was doing my Masters a few years back and it’s continued to fascinate me (and yes, I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit whilst considering, and defending, Twitter).

Here’s an observation from some Japanese ethnographic research into the use of camera phones by young people undertaken by Daisuke Okabe (2004):

intimate sharing / presence sharing intimate photos on the handset when talking face to face with people. Photos that fall into this category would be photos of partners, family, pets, etc. However, this can also be very every day stuff eg. what I’m having for dinner. It is sharing ongoing mundane visual information with intimates, creating a sense of presence in other peoples lives without needing to talk or be physically present.

I think that the simplicity of Twitter is key to it’s success. The messages must be short and they’re simple text.  I’m starting to think that the level of stimulation is key to the success of these ‘osmotic’ communications (as the guys from LastFM referred to the IRC channel they use internally).

We’ve been trialling some options for a similar kind of osmotic backchannel to use at Flow. One of the first things we roadtested was Skype Public Chat. Amongst some other problems (including that there is no Mac version of the current release which supports the Public Chat function), it seemed that the flashing and noises and animated emoticons were too stimulating… the conversation wanted to leap to the front of the screen continually demanded attention.

IRC on the other hand (ah, what a flash back to open up mIRC again after all these years!) reminds me a lot more of Twitter. There’s none of the flashing and animating and carrying on. The humour is in the text (it took about 30 seconds for the first trout related comment to emerge… old habits…). To me, IRC seems to be a much more effective tool for a back channel, for supporting this osmotic communication within a company. (Assuming we can reduce the barrier to ‘log on’… it’s not a friendly experience for not-geeks).

What does seems clear is that, for a lot of people, this ambient intimacy adds value to people’s lives and their relationships with others. I think we can expect to see a lot more of it… but if I was building a tool to support it, I’d be keeping it very simple and unobtrusive. Osmosis is one thing, hyper-stimulation is quite another!

Twitter Me

Image credit: Slide used by LastFM in their presentation at FOWA

Reference: Okabe, Daisuke 2004, Emergent Social Practices, Situations and Relations through everyday camera phone use, presented at Mobile Communication and Social Change, the 2004 International Conference on Mobile Communication in Seoul, Korea, October 18-19 2004

157 thoughts on “Ambient Intimacy”

  1. […] I came across this interesting article focusing on what the author calls “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.  Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight. […]

  2. […] 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. (tags: relationships community twitter social-software flickr communication) […]

  4. […] This post on ambient intimacy – even though the second half of the post has nothing to do with mobile phones – got me thinking about the way i, and many other mobile rangers, are sharing our lives. We are using dead simple applications to share tiny bits of our lives very often. We are doing this because these sharing services are both dead simple to use and also because they’re multi-modal. I can add a post, or check the posts of people i care about, in a variety of ways – including from any mobile phone. Both these factors don’t just effect what i share, since my posts are limited to 140 characters or a picture or a video, they effect how often i share things – which is quite often. And most my friends on these services do the same. […]

  5. Leisa – love it. I have thought of htis as continuous partial community – with a nod to Linda Stone. But I really like the ambient intimacy term much better. I have been trying to explain the phenomenon of lightweight connection and the term community is too heavy and has too much baggage.

  6. […] Anyway, whether you call it ambient intimacy or lifestream or flow (my own catch phrase – we all need a good catch phrase, right? – being the diaspora of you), a number of Web 2.0 start-ups are working to aggregate and mediate the socialisation of this loosely joined stream of personal information. The latest one I’ve stumbled across is iStalkr. I’m not sure about the slightly menacing concept behind the brand but their intent is to provide a visual representation of your lifestream (a little bit like Journal in Outlook, though I’ve admittedly never got the hang of that) through pulling together all your LastFM, twitter, RSS feeds etc into one coherent stream. Here’s mine, which looks a little empty right now. may I should get a life. Tumblr is another, simpler implementation of a similar concept but is less explicitly social. […]

  7. […] Via James  I found Ted, who links to Leisa Reichelt on Amibent Latency. (two new adds to the feed) 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. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight. […]

  8. […] disambiguity – » 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.” […]

  9. […] I spent some time last week at the fabulous Reboot conference and was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to share some ideas around concept of Ambient Intimacy, which I continue to find fascinating. It was great to have the opportunity to develop and share my thoughts. […]

  11. […] Ambient Intimacy Lisa Reichelt: “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.” read on! […]

  12. Just had a bad experience with Ambient Intimacy. I popped in too late on a friend’s life. Found out I missed an event that was life changing for my pal. The key word in the Ambient Intimacy definition is regularity….but suppose we take that to mean whenever it is most convenient to me and not to our people. Too little, too late.

  15. […] Is it surprising that a firm which set out to be the first blogging analyst company should take the top spots in such a poll? Of course not. But it is a nice validation of our strategy -sure it is. We don’t put information behind a firewall, which dramatically improves our ambient findability. We use social software to benefit from ambient intimacy. We want to be easy to deal with. We want to be fun. We want to be smart. We want to learn from a range of communities, not just one narrow constituency. I think the Top 50 award represents all of that. So that’s a good start to the week. […]

  19. […] interestingly enough the bit i enjoyed most and made me reconsider my opinion was the twitter-like feature where people write what they are doing now. I totally get the appeal in it but i experienced this with very mixed feelings. on the one hand i’m sold to the idea of ambient intimacy – there is indeed something charming in the ways it makes us feel closer to people we somehow care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like. but on the other hand there’s a very very thin line between the charm and wit to the excessive, sticky noise and personally I’m not good with being selective and taking these things in small doses. […]

  26. Roman Jacobson, not Mikhail Bakhtin, coined the term “phatic function”, keeping communication channels open.

  27. […] 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.” — Leisa Reichelt (www.disambiguity.com/ambient-intimacy) […]

  28. […] Until then, we experiment with managing our online selves, learning to be careful about what we share and how we share it. We have learned etiquette for using mobile phones and made them the new garden fence. The use of blogs to document and share personal experience and practical knowledge with others is becoming more mainstream. Those on the cutting edge use twitter and campfire to provide ambient intimacy and virtual context. […]

  29. […] 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. (tags: twitter online web social mobile pownce) […]

  31. […] To my surprise and delight, I recently came across a discussion of this very same feeling, where the phenomenon was termed “ambient intimacy”. This beautifully descriptive name illustrates “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…It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like.” I think that this is the very thing that makes online social networking so addictive for me, as I’m sure it is for many others as well, whose lives have made them too busy, or taken them too far away to be able to keep up with everyone they wish were a daily part of their lives. […]

  36. […] In addition to learning how to tell our story well, I do believe that part of the problem is we are so flooded with so much info today, that we are also having to relearn how to listen – and how we learn. Social technologies that foster microblogging like twitter, bookmarking, aggregating news, and even facebook, help me navigate thru’ this more easily.  Much has been written about Continuous Partial Attention (Linda Stone) and Ambient Intimacy (Lisa Reichelt) that apps like Twitter provide – they give us interesting frameworks for examining our own behaviours. […]

  37. […] With a headline like Why collaborative research analysis rocks out it was no surprise I found Lisa Reichelt’s recent blog made very interesting reading. Leisa, originator of the wonderfully evocative phrase Ambient Intimacy, and all round sticky note queen (3M should sponsor her) argues thusly: These days when I’m doing any kind of user research, rather than going to my secret consultant place and doing that consultant magic that results in a presentation of research findings, I much prefer to get into a big room with clean walls and several hundred sticky notes and my clients/project team, and to work out the research findings collaboratively. […]

  38. […] So for this first post, I’d like to refer to a very interesting post from Leisa Reichelt’s blog (one of my personal favorite.) She’s exposing the “Ambient Intimacy” notion or how the intimate communication is stimulated through original and modern web tools. I’m myself very intrigued at the web social network phenomenon. […]

  41. […] We talked kids and spouses, social media, continuous partial attention, ambient intimacy, books and a bunch of other subjects of interest. It was fun, but unlike what usually happens when you meet someone for the first time, the complex and challenging social barrier of introduction was missing – we just didn’t need it as our online connectedness through tools like Facebook and Twitter had already done the hard work for us. […]

  44. […] It raised some interesting ideas about how Web2.0 – commenting how the “continuous partial attention” or “ambient intimacy” is really changing the way that we have communicated – from the scope of audience to the ephemerality of the message to the latency between sender and receiver – from the basic face to face and print to “print plus (my term)” and “f2f plus” again with technology helping to shape the various elements of how the message exists. […]

  45. […] the parallel threads that i see linking that age to this one talk about many of the same issues – cultural responses, enabled by new technologies, seek to extend the role of creative individuals and communities beyond the restrictions of previous media generations. the democracy – or meritocracy – of creative practice and dissemination of ideas, practices and values, and it’s potential impact for transforming g/local economies and communities can more accurately embody the principles of each participant. our media, as of late, has enabled a more ‘human’ representation in communicating remotely – social networks encouraging slivering identity, mobile platforms mapping new topographies of social presence and ambient intimacy, media bricolage creating an emergent expression economy. […]

  46. […] Where is my continuous partial attention? If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Those of us involved in social media spend a good deal of our time rabbiting on about continuous partial attention, the ambient intimacy afforded to us and the social capital generated by use of the tools we leverage such as Facebook and Twitter as well as the real, human communities these actually represent. […]

  47. […] Ambient Intimacy This. is. freaking. awesome. No, seriously it is. I think we have our an entire generation that will enter its adulthood on this concept. It is; however, hard for me to be entirely sure since I am a fogey of this generation. Born in at the very, very end of 1979 — I am very close to the generational cusp. I have been finding this to be more and more true as I get older and enter the workplace but I digress. […]

  48. […] The presentation of “best practices” took some different twists and turns due to a very interactive audience (which was great), but the one section that I enjoyed was the idea of Twitter providing “ambient intimacy” between users. As said by Lisa Reichelt: It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like. […]

  49. […] Entitled “Seduction of the Swarm: Understanding patterns of online participation“, I chose to build on the collective intelligence series I’ve been working on, helping to flesh out productive ideas on participatory culture. Much like a tour of online-centric ideologies, I’ll be making mentions from books like Wikinomics, Wisdom of the Crowds, as well as concepts of the gift economy, bits vs. atoms, Amy Jo Kim’s Five Game Mechanics, Leisa Reichelt’s Ambient Intimacy, as well as my personal stake: The Return of Walled Gardens. […]

  50. […] …et pourtant je m’amusais déjà avec le mood message de skype que je mets à jour tous les jours. Ensuite j’ai continué à m’amuser avec les status update de Facebook. À suivre mes êtres chers ailleurs, à laisser des pistes sur mon quotidien… Mais depuis Facebook Beacon, j’ai de moins en moins envie de laisser ma trace via Facebook: j’ai vérrouillé mes privacy settings à mort, bloqué Beacon, coupé court aux histoires suscitant le voyeurisme des mini-feeds, éliminé un tas d’applications inutiles juste pour le fun et revisité la signification d’amis de sorte que je suis fière de n’avoir que 10 amis! Ensuite je suis tombée sur The RWW Guide to the World’s Most Popular Twitter Clients ainsi que sur d’autres ressources abordant la notion d’ambient intimacy (i.e. 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, Leisa Reichelt) et aussi Video: Twitter and Ambient Intimacy. […]

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