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.
Ironically, with distances between objects shrinking, the distances between subjects seem to increase. 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. From US Representative Anthony Weiner’s “sexting” to Facebook friendships, and other 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.
And Anthony Weiner’s bizarre internet adventures may be symptomatic of a more pessimistic broader phenomenon. Philip Zimbardo, the scientist who carried out the infamous Stanford prison experiment in the early 1970s (read this interview with him in design mind), argues 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 therefore concludes 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 with others than in more serious pursuits, is one of the indications of how widespread the phenomenon of immature male-hood has become.
Where does that leave the concept of intimacy? You could argue that it is best cherished in reclaimed analog spaces, in those “hiding in plain sight” 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. From the artificial closeness of ad-hoc individual encounters such as the casual chat with the barista in your coffee shop or the conversation at an exclusive conference, or in communal moments such as a flash mob – intimacy becomes possible through coincidental “meetings of the minds” that literally catch us off guard. Outside of our comfort zones the paths less traveled cross more often, and the comfort of strangers makes us intimately and acutely aware of whom we are.
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