A selection from a recent post on ambient intimacy on my blog about photography, travel and culture:

Intimacy without being Intimate.

Intermittent, one-way, more of a “crush” than love; the feeling of a shared relationship without it being shared, a benevolent form of stalking; ambient intimacy is what happens when we strengthen our loose ties, by keeping in touch with people by following, reading and caring about another person without telling them you care.

… The Paradox.

But here’s the paradox: as much as I want to decry our expanding loose networks, fracturing attention and fake friendships sustained through our ambient connections, maximizing the power of loose networks and loose ties is the real opportunity; it’s where I’ve met the most interesting people, learned the most interesting things, connected to new opportunities; it’s where we find growth and create new value, it’s where we find new edges; it’s the source of innovation and insights we would not have seen otherwise. It’s why we care about serendipity and discovery; we’re hooked by the positive variable intermittent reinforcement baked into all successful, widely-adopted tools; an insight, an opportunity, a confirmation, a life-changing connection behind every click.

Why is this important?

As Jim Mitchem (@smashadv) pointed out in the comments, “there are amazing opportunities that exist behind each of these human collisions“.

Balancing the benefits and costs of human collisions is the core of discovery, search, serendipity and filtering; it’s why we care about Google, Twitter and the fail whale, journalism, public relations, marketing, social media, blogging, et. al; at the core of every consumer, user, customer, marketer, developer and salesman is a person responding to the incentives that frame their worlds. Deep within the birth, rise, decline and death of any industry or product is a better way to create, understand, structure and balance the human collisions in our worlds.

With that, here’s to maximizing collisions…

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