Technology Enabling Intimacy
Many fear technology is eliminating the ability of people to form intimate connections with those around them. All around we see people engaged in their phones, glued to their tablets, texting someone from across a room, and more. This is often viewed negatively; however, there is another side to this new era of technology and Internet.
Technology can enable, rather than only hinder, intimacy. This TEDTalk delves into this topic and explains all the ways technology can enable and create new forms of intimacy:
Sometimes, those that are most important to us live hours away, or even across the ocean. Technology and the Internet allow for connections, close intimate connections, with people far away to be maintained, or even created. These forms of intimacy take place over screens and through wires, but it is intimacy nonetheless.
Despite large numbers of friends or followers, Broadbent explains how communication patterns are still intimate, or only mainly between a few people. Intimate relations are still being formed and are being maintained in part or in full via technology and the Internet.
Additionally, recent readings have discussed the change in separation of private and public. Broadbent brings up the point that extreme separation of private and public did not start until people had to leave their homes to work about 150 years ago (when they began entering factories and more). Technology is eliminating separation of private and public created by the movement into factories and lack of communication sources. Now, private spheres can be reached while in a public sphere. This allows for intimacy to grow during work days and for people to feel less of a separation. Technology and the Internet are reshaping private and public spheres by enabling intimacy in new forms at all hours of the day.
Sources:
- Ha, Thu-Huong HaThu-Huong. “American Teens Are Getting Hooked on Fiction by Text Message.” Quartz, Quartz, 1 Dec. 2016.
- Broadbent, Stefana. “How the Internet Enables Intimacy.” TED: Ideas Worth Spreading. 2009.
- A Blog About Technology Updates, earlytechnews.
