Intimate Connections

Is it perverse that your boss might know more about your life than your best friends? That you spend more time with your desk neighbor at work than with your spouse? That your colleagues experience you in more emotionally extreme situations than most of your friends, in moments of utmost success and failure, triumph and defeat?

Perhaps it is not. In times of uber-connectivity, constant stimulus, and near work/life congruence, it is no surprise that work relationships can often provide more emotional and intellectual kinship (true intimacy requires an actual “meeting of minds” rather than just bodily pleasures, as any psychologist would submit) than other social institutions (such as marriage, family, or church) which are deliberately designed to meet the human need for intimacy.

Philip Zimbardo, the scientist who carried out the infamous Stanford prison experiment in the early 1970s (read this interview with him in design mind), contends that intimacy has all but disappeared from modern life, at least male modern life. In his short TED talk this year, entitled "The Demise of Guys," he presented some astonishing statistics. Apparently, teenage boys now view an average of 50 porno clips per week. Zimbardo argues that gaming and porn digitally rewire boys’ brains for constant arousal, eventually leading to their failure as men, both sexually and socially, because they’re no longer able to establish and sustain intimate loving relationships with the opposite sex. He thinks that the proliferation of "guy bonding" movies, in which adult men are portrayed as adolescent, immature beings that are more interested in bonding activities than in serious pursuits, is one of the indications of how widespread the phenomenon of immature male-hood has become.

It is a remarkable paradox of our radical age of transparency, where everyone virtually knows everyone, that intimacy is now mainly enabled by publicity, computed by social technologies, and personalized through digital “touchpoints” which are anything but personal. Ironically, with distances between objects shrinking, the distances between subjects (and the need for "artificial intimacy") seem to increase. From US Representative Anthony Weiner’s “sexting,” to out-of-control Facebook parties (a teenage girl in Germany who forgot to mark her birthday invitation as private on Facebook fled her own party when more than 1,500 guests showed up), and other bizarre forms of digital interactions with virtual companions, it seems as if we’re increasingly unable to find and nurture intimacy with people we know, and increasingly seeking for it in encounters with people we don’t know. The proverbial “comfort of strangers” has become the rare intimate moment disrupting the many mundane moments in our entangled webs of social connectedness.

True intimacy then is perhaps best cherished in reclaimed analog spaces, in those settings that are small enough not to be “socialized,” serendipitous enough not to be “personalized,” and public enough not to intrude our sense of privacy. In fleeting encounters – lunch conversations at exclusive conferences, casual chats with the barista in the coffee shop, or encounters with people we meet on the road while traveling – intimacy becomes possible through coincidental “meetings of the minds” that literally catch us off guard. Outside of our social networks the paths less traveled cross more often, and outside of our comfort zones the comfort of strangers makes us intimately and acutely aware of whom we are.

[picture: out-of-control facebook party; AP]

Tim Leberecht is the CMO of frog and the publisher of design mind.