Distant Intimacy

Abstract

Participants value Facebook as a means of connecting with people who have moved out of their immediate life-worlds. These ties have become ‘distanced’, although this term can refer to different kinds of ‘distances’. For example, people may become geographically distanced; they may remain geographically proximate but exist in different social spaces — say, different workplaces — and they may become distanced in time. Old high school friends are a common example of temporally distanced, ‘estranged ties’.