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Intimacy generally refers to the feeling of being in a close personal association and belonging together. It is a familiar and very close affective connection with another as a result of entering deeply or closely into relationship through knowledge and experience of the other. Genuine intimacy in human relationships requires dialogue, transparency, vulnerability and reciprocity.
So, you may ask what does it have to do with Social Media?
Intimacy with others:
Every morning, we wake up and some of us reach out to our laptops. This is true for those who go to work. But what I have started to see is that most of us log into Facebook. What we are checking out is our news feed. We start to see what some of our friends are doing? What some of our business associates are saying? What some of those people we don’t know are talking about?
Suddenly, this simple act of checking our news feed cultivates into interacting with them. We start to comment OR like some of those news feed. And then there is a sudden feeling of being close to people we care about and those we would like to know better. There is a dialogue that makes us feel part of their lives and transparency that they display wins out instant trust with them….And this dialogue and transparency was the genesis of building relationships even before social media arrived.
Intimacy with self:
When we check out our Facebook profile, we see someone we love MOST – that is YOU/ME. And just seeing how closely we are knit with our friends, family and colleagues gives us an instant self-confidence. Man is a social animal. Social Media enables man to be SOCIAL at a level that was not possible before. On your Birthday, you thank Facebook, since you get messages from people all over the world. The large list of people wishing you “Happy Birthday” makes a public statement of how blessed you are – Don’t deny it! We all love attention on our Birthdays.
Intimacy in building relationships:
Twitter has made it possible to Follow people and really build an instant communication with them. The @replies make it possible for people to have a public conversation with some people you either have relationships with or want to build relationships with. And when you have communicated with them, it is possible you will send them a DM to further engage with them at a deeper level. Followed by personal email and then potential meeting. This intimacy even before you have met the person gives us a sense of a relationship based on the context of that communication. You know what are the interests, passions of the person you are engaging with – instantly giving intimacy to this budding relationship.
Intimacy is a human tradition and social media is emerging medium – Intimacy scores well with Social Media…