The most intimate you can be is a face to face interaction, whether in a public (less intimate) or private (more intimate) space. This requires making time to exchange immediate remarks with another soul on at least one topic for more than, say, a few minutes. This is a heavy investment.
Less intimate but still quite intimate is the cell phone call, which again requires live exchanges and is predicated on a prior exchange of information that could come back to haunt you. (As in, you might conceivably be called by this person. More on this in a moment. It's intimate because if you should call them--even to leave a voicemail--there was, nevertheless, a chance she or he might have actually answered. And then you'd have to talk. You know that going in. And yes, you get credit for trying. By the by, you should keep their number in your phone at all times, even if you don't intend to speak with them again, because at least you'll know whom you're avoiding.)
Nearly as intimate is IM for similar reasons, but as people are wont to conduct multiple simultaneous IM chats, surf the net, listen to music, etc., it does not reach the level of attention required for f2f or cell intimacy.
Next comes the email, which demands a degree of literary finesse and sustained thought in a particular direction. Attention to one's audience. Usually comes with an expectation of a response and a continuing dialogue. Sure, this could be dragged out over weeks, even months--you can always say it got lost in a huge influx of emails and let's face it, not all emails are equally pressing--but it still remains part of a call-and-response format.
The text message is still baffling to me, but I think it's less of an emotional commitment than email: many interviewed in my research name the specific advantage of the tm that "you don't have to actually interact with the person. You can just say what you want to say and move on." On the other hand, the text message has a quality of playfulness--flirtation?--that none of the others have. Coincidentally, it allows for subterranean communication outside the bounds of polite social discourse, such as, "meet u bhind stairs 4 whatev" and "beyotch."
And though I might have though otherwise at first, the most superficial form of communication is apparently Facebook. Yes, there are entry requirements ("friends"), but those can be relatively low thresholds. You're certainly not going to say anything too controversial in wall-to-wall. This is mostly, but not always, breezy, cocktail party chatter. There is a messaging option in here, which has the potential of being creepy because people aren't expecting that level of intimacy here. Women I've spoken with say this is where the high school acquaintance you haven't seen for 10 years writes, "I see you're not married or in a relationship, so if you're in town maybe we could ...?" (Ew.) But sometimes a dinner's just a dinner, said Freud. At any rate, Fb is very fun, entertaining, but there's not too much "you" there because it would be a little off-putting to most people. Conversely, there are relationships so intimate you might not even want to sully them with Fb. And then there's hedging your bets, as in, Should I friend this person I might not even want to know in a few months?
What am I missing here?
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