An Intimate Relationship

People have certain needs for food, water, sleep,etc. But they also have needs to prove themselves to others or to feel unique, loved and nurtured. When the need of a yearning for uniqueness comes up, there goes the media salivating with content, activating surely and happily, the product that we use -football, facebook, google, mobile phones, golf, computers.

What a paradox?! : People are in search of unique materials so that they can share it with friends! First of all, media helps people combine different sorts of thoughts such as asking private questions or putting feelings and beliefs into public domains. With enough attention, media and the product wins over the feelings of the people.

“(…) rather then working out what people could like, another company found out just by asking. It’s called Facebook. It was a brillant idea because one thing that it guaranteed was to be unique; this is the story of individual people. Everybody’s story is unique and always will be.(…) The uniqueness of an individual is more and more important.” As Tom Chatfield explains, there is nothing that is more unique than a human being and Facebook combines the uniqueness of an individual with the yearning of being public.

Chatfield continues by saying, “Just back in about 1900’s, sports were just a thing that people did for fun, occasionally with each other. There was almost no money in it. One of the great stories of 20th century is how mass media combined all to generate the greatest community experiences in the history of humanity.” He analyses the need of sharing historical facts. It did not happen just in sports, it happened in every area such as live broadcasting. In July 1921, the boxing match in New Jersey had 210,000 more people outside than the live audience inside, all waiting outside just to hear the radio live broadcast.

Media gets people’s attention by using their emotions. “Personal computing was a real revolution in 1970’s and 80’s.This idea that a computer is something that every person can have in their homes changed the world. Intimate computing happened after personal computing. A computer nowadays is not just personal to us, it is an extention of us in a very personal intimate sense. 8 to 20 year olds are using the media for 10 hours a day. For the majority of the American teenagers, the first thing they touch when they wake up in the morning and the last thing they touch at night is an iphone or an ipad. If you want them to describe the feeling of it, the words ‘love – for better or for worse’ comes into mind! (…) It’s not about what the engineers did with an iphone, it’s about the kind of experience they gave: the touchscreen. This is a new level for computing.” Technology has become a part of our body . The intimacy teenagers get from touching a screen has become more and more attractive then ever before. The media is humbly trying to follow in the steps of this intimate computing, searching for ways not to fail their captive and yet questioning audience, demanding a human level.