Indiana University | jbardzel@indiana.edu
Indiana University | selu@indiana.edu
Few people would say that they wished their romantic lives were more like computing: efficient, automated, inorganic, and lightning fast. Yet technology is becoming increasingly implicated in the most intimate aspects of our lives and selves. At the same time we see calls in HCI to make technology more human scaled, everyday, domestic, and emotionally competent. Both of these trends are evidence that technology and cultural practices are still calibrating to one another. As a result, paying special attention to the intersections of technology and symbolically and emotionally dense cultural experiences, such as sex, food, and art, can be especially illuminating.
We use the term “intimacy” as opposed to “sexuality” to emphasize the broadest and most inclusive notions of human sexuality as they have been explored in psychology, women’s studies, philosophy, sociology, and literary theory, among other fields. This more expansive conceptualization of sexuality goes far beyond acts of physical sex to include a wide range of human relationships, such as friendship and romantic attachment; categories
of experience, from pleasure to anxiety; and philosophically rich conceptual domains, such as embodiment and identity.
To be sure, technology has created abundant opportunity for emotionally vacuous sexual content. However, we bracket such content aside, not because it lacks social or technical significance, but rather because undue emphasis on it potentially forecloses more nuanced understandings of how everyday people find emotional fulfillment in online social spaces. Research on positive aspects of intimacy online has the potential to give interaction designers insight into the relationships between technology and some of the deepest and most meaningful dimensions of human experience.
The Self on the Screen We have witnessed the rise of an important innovation in the relationship between the user and the system. In traditional productivity applications, software, data, and processes are all inside the computer, while the user is outside, looking in through the monitor. With the rise of social technologies, we are increasingly seeing a different relationship:
The user now has an explicit and visible representation inside the screen as well. This representation has different names, including “profile” and “avatar,” and it is ultimately through this representation of the self, rather than the “real” self sitting in “meat space,” that people interact with data, systems, and one another in computer-mediated settings.
Avatars are perhaps the most visible example. They can range from a simple photo (e.g., in Facebook) to a fully realized videogame character with an otherworldly appearance, extensive cultural history, and set of abilities and racial characteristics (e.g., in World of Warcraft). Going back in time, avatars in the multi-user dungeons (MUDs) of the 1990s were text-based representations of the self, composed by users and shared with other users. Though diverse in origin and use, avatars all share a common feature: Their relationship to their meat-space counterparts is symbolic, manipulable, idealized, and/or dynamic. A glimpse of one’s Facebook or Twitter contacts, for instance, reveals a range of profile photos, from glamour shots to Simpsons characters, rather than every-
September + October 2008
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