Intimacy and Loneliness Everyday communication is conducted in discrete zones, Facebook, Twitter, email, IM, Skype, SMS. Abstracted and mapped onto functions like upload, send, attach, comment, tag. These functions often overlap and don’t facilitate intimate interaction with other people. Communicating feels like filling in a form, and notifications of these communications adds to the cacophony of distracting bleeps and bounces that subliminally increase our stress levels and reduce our concentration. We’ve become prolific journalists of our own lives yet this mass of work and energy produces no beautiful thing, nothing that someone else can behold and cherish. We’re compelled to spend so much of our time away from the people we love, yet we develop these disperse virtual identities that are becoming omnipresent, can we create something out of these identities that makes our absence less felt?

Being connected online and having new forums help invent new ways of communicating and has been a huge benefit to our society, although the potential for communication in my opinion hasn’t really been exploited online, we’re still using the internet in the way we used pens and paper, writing things down, sending them, waiting for a response. The advances we see are in the speed and scope of our textual communication. Faster and broader. But no change in the quality of our communication, the mass of these efforts has no weight, no singular representation in our lives.

Robin Dunbar is an evolutionary anthropologist who has conducted research on how our social world is constructed by what we can handle. The size of the social group we can have is dictated by our brains, the number of relationships we can maintain a personal history with is 150. Cross cultural and backed up by research.

We should use the internet to create richer relationships, because there is no doubt that in densely populated societies, the internet is a great management utility for our relationships, but simply broadcasting our thoughts and feelings out to our communities and communicating textually will never create sustainable and rich friendships ‘words are slippery stuff’ and real communication relies heavily on face to face interaction and touch.

If each sentence, photo, friend, email, message, were a small piece of Playdoh dropped into a bucket, when we roll all the pieces together what kind of thing would it create, how big would it be, what colour would it be, would absent friends and family grow to cherish it?

This would be your digital footprint made visible. Can we create something with a personality that changes and evolves depending on you, that a friend or loved one can relate to as representing you, something that can live in many places and be a companion, and become a new way of communicating with someone, a way of making online interactions more fun, spontaneous, engaging, rather than technical, functional and cold. Can we make our online lives more intimate?

I propose making software that can live on a bespoke unit or more plausibly on a mobile phone, that can marry with your partners corresponding software, and once partnered, can never be undone. You would link avatars together so two people would be connected through these Tamagochi-like objects opening up the possibility of more intimate interactions. On their phone your partner could record a wake up call for you that’s transmitted to their avatar on your phone, being there in the morning to gently wake you up. It could grow large and vibrant when you get closer to them, vibrate when the other person cups the phone. Fade if you haven’t been close for any length of time. People should be able to invent their own interactions on top of the platform. The myriad sensors on mobile devices are opening opportunities to develop more surprising communication and continuous sharing.

It would be great if the internet could incorporate touch, movement and warmth to text, image and sound when communicating whilst apart, developing a free new environment for deepening relationships with whoever you choose.

Intimacy and Lonliness image by Mike Mills.