Ambient Intimacy

Definition

Ambient intimacy is "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."

The term was coined by the Australian user experience designer Leisa Reichelt in a post on her site disambiguity on 1 March 2007, written in response to the early adoption of Twitter and Flickr.

Description

Reichelt's argument turns on a defence of triviality. The common complaint about status updates — that nobody needs to know what you had for lunch — misses what the updates are for. Knowing what someone had for lunch is not the point; having been told is. The content is close to irrelevant, and its irrelevance is what makes the exchange cheap enough to sustain daily with dozens of people at once.

She connects this to phatic communication, Bronisław Malinowski's term for speech whose function is to establish and maintain a social bond rather than to convey information — "how are you," remarks about the weather, the noises made during a phone call to signal that one is still listening. Ambient intimacy is phatic communication industrialised: a continuous, low-bandwidth stream of small signals that together maintain a relationship across distance and time zones without requiring either party to schedule anything.

The practical result Reichelt describes is that when people who have been following each other's streams finally meet, the usual reconstruction of the intervening months is unnecessary. The relationship has been running quietly the whole time.

Characteristics

• Low intensity, high frequency. Each signal costs almost nothing to send or receive; the effect is cumulative rather than located in any one message.
• Peripheral. It works in the background of attention. This is why Reichelt argued that simple, undemanding interfaces support it better than ones full of animation and alerts — the moment the stream demands attention, it stops being ambient.
• Asymmetric and unaddressed. Updates are broadcast rather than sent. Nobody is obliged to respond, which is what makes the volume tolerable.
• Osmotic. Knowledge accumulates without anyone deciding to transmit or acquire it.
• Scale-dependent. Ambient intimacy works up to the number of people whose small signals a person can absorb without effort, and degrades sharply past it.

Criticism

The concept has attracted three consistent objections. The first is Dunbar's: attention is finite, and a stream large enough to be ambient is usually too large to be intimate, so what accumulates is awareness rather than closeness. The second is that platforms have systematically broken the conditions Reichelt identified — algorithmic ordering, engagement optimisation and advertising make the stream demanding rather than peripheral, at which point ambient intimacy becomes ambient obligation. Reichelt herself has revisited the term in this light, noting that the quiet, self-selected stream she described in 2007 no longer resembles what the platforms deliver. The third is that the intimacy is unevenly distributed: the labour of maintaining a visible, updating presence falls disproportionately on some people, and the pleasure of receiving it on others.

Related Reading

• Ambient Socialization
• Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance
• Paralanguage
• Status
• Calm Technology