Lost on Route 66

Face-to-face contact is still the limiting reagent

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Last night I tweeted from a sushi restaurant about something new I was going to try. By now, Twitter has most of us trained to post just about anything with a modicum of interest. "The sky is blue." "I like ice." "I'm about to eat live shellfish."

Knowing there were a couple of friends on Facebook who might be interested in knowing what the sushi chef was poking in front of me (to prove it was still alive), I updated my status as well.

I found the timing of the responses and my reaction to them interesting. Twitter started and ended quickly. After the initial responses, my original tweet was lost in the noise of the timeline. On FB, the news feed tends to have lower volume and many of us scan backwards. When's the last time you heard of someone scanning back in his or her Twitter timeline? (by the time you’ve read these first three paragraphs, you've probably missed a hundred tweets)

The Twitter responses were from someone I've never met, but with whom I have shared work-related RTs, and two from people I met a couple weeks ago at a conference. They were all amusing. There was a sense of connection; however it would be more accurate to say it felt as if they were watching me on TV.

On FB, the experience was quite different. Responses came over the next hour or so. Friends I hadn't talked to in years replied. We had friended each other and traded a couple of initial messages, but that was it. An old friend I had visited months ago replied. I went to his wall and left a comment. Someone else included an unrelated question. I replied on her wall. (Kudos to the new iPhone FB app for making the transition between profiles seamless.) When I read each person’s comment, I could hear their voice and imagine how they might say it. My reaction to each was unique.

This is not to compare Twitter to FB. The Twitter contacts were all professional. FB, all personal. Ambient intimacy, though triggered by these brief connections, is limited by the existing relationship, in which I believe face-to-face contact eventually becomes a limiting reagent.

Point being, face-to-face contact is still a major turning point in relationships begun online. The depth of a relationship enhances the contextual bandwidth; especially for those of us who speak low-context languages, such as English.

Filed under // ambientintimacy Facebook socialmedia sushi Twitter

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Face-to-face contact is still the limiting reagent