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10 Levels of Intimacy in Communication

Great idea by  Ji Lee! He shows us the 10 levels of today's communications.

Posted by clementine 

Comments (6)

Sep 02, 2009
Sprite said...
Love this!
Sep 04, 2009
Long Nguyen said...
Talking as number 10... That's messed up. Body language is missing.
Sep 04, 2009
Todd Randolph said...
interesting visual, although I think it ignores the concept of synchronicity as a measure of interactivity. for example, in a real conversation, one person speaks and the other responds. with a letter, on the other hand, one person "speaks," but even aside from the delay in transmission, the other person has control over when he or she replies.

using this basis of comparison, the items can be categorized in three ways. conversation, video chat and telephone achieve the highest level of synchronous communication. messages - instant, text, facebook or twitter - have the potential to be synchronous but do not have to be. facebook status updates also fall into this category (although communication by status message seems rather impersonal!). email and snail mail correspondence, while arguably more private, cannot achieve the intimacy of synchronous communication.

I would also argue the categorization of twitter messages as broadcast (one to many) when those getting the greatest value from the service are using it as a conversational medium. those conversations may be public, but they can still be very personal...

Sep 04, 2009
Aaron Jackson said...
@Todd I was going to say I wasn't sure that #7 was necessary, but your insights are a little deeper than that...
Sep 04, 2009
Kimberly Wilder said...
I love this chart as a beginning. Though, I think that at some point someone should realize that these would be different for everyone. I read this book about how for some people, visual cues will send them to their "id" brain, and aural cues will send them to their "social brain" or something. Everyone is different. For me, e-mail is much more intimate than phone. Because, I hate to be on the phone. And, I am a born writer.
Sep 05, 2009
Colin T. said...
i must say this has to be the closest description for the levels of intimacy

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