Exploring Project #1

Choose someone you have an intimate relationship with, communicate with them via a technology novel to them. Report on any responses from the subject and yourself.

My subject:
Mikie Graham

29 year old white male who grew up in tigard OR, a suburb of portland. Currently works at a steampunk large gauge jewelry shop and is a rep for blamo toys in San Francisco. Has a degree in Film studies and is currently single.
Now that the stats are out of the way, he is the kind of guy that doesn’t worry about anything and is in a good mood all the time, an optimist for sure. Shies away from confrontation only to let anger harbor within leading to explosions later set off by the most trivial of offenses. Acceptance, he is very accepting, I have a hard accepting people for who they are, but Mikie is oddly aware of what people are capable of and has no problem accepting it and moving on.

Choosing mikie was an apparent one, not only is he the single person i have an intimate relationship with on several levels that spans a decade, but he also is not the savviest when it comes to emerging social technologies. Might faulter on how he is to describe things in detail, but in the end is thorough in communication.

First is a rundown of some of the different planes that construct our relationship, before i deal with the smaller intricacies that have emerged from under those.
Started as someone to feel a connection with through group activities, planned potlucks, got drunk and danced together, went to our first burning man together (an institution to San Franciscans).
Proximity comes into play when I end up moving down the street from him, we then end up hanging out together one on one all the time. He is going through a break up, I had gone through a rough one that he was already well aware of since he was friends with both me and my ex. He could give me a fresh perspective on a stale topic that I could trust since I knew he had the experience of knowing my ex. Which gave him some authority in the matter. We discovered that we were both physically attracted to each other which lead to us sleeping together and starting our physical relationship. We soon shared living in the same space together and was then spending everyday together. From that arose heightened levels of humility and awareness. We began to know what each other were like all seconds of the day.
Within this period we dealt with death together, traveling, creative endeavors, dangerous adventures. We were true partners in crime. We then shared in the darker, more hurtful range of feelings and activities, learning to live without something you love. the absence of presence from something that was a fixture in your life; loss. Basically we ended our physical relationship and were able to endure the heartbreak that caused us, while still remaining friends and somewhat confidants. That ended two years ago, and we still are able to tell each other everything. Being able to withstand the feeling of betrayal, the ability to go pass your personal wounds and truly understand another’s point of view; sacrifice.

In Short I believe what makes out relationship intimate is the variety of transformations it has undergone and within that still having the endurance what we receive from each other today. Our lives also paralleled, we were on the same page, both in college, hung out with the same core group of kids, both in long term relationships, both left our relationships. We then started dating and ran our lives as one. Splitting in two, while still keeping ourselves as our safe houses, despite the pain we had caused each other.

Common interests, we are very similar in the fact that we are both explorers and collectors.

Set Up of Experiment:
I chose Aim for Mikie and I to communicate through. Sending Mikie to the Aim website was all that really needed to be done. He downloaded it and had the application running in no time. The only small confusion was when it took him a second to find where to create an account.
I ended up adding him as a buddy since he also couldn’t find either for some reason. All in all, a very simple process.
After we were up and running I decided to try something I never had either, video chat. Turns out on Aim you can have a one sided video chat, the person with the camera gets to have whatever their web cam picks up display on the recipients computer along with hearing your voice through their speakers. Their side of the conversation comes up as bubbles in the chat window.

The Conversation:
Mostly the conversation surrounded around the system itself, like “I wonder if I can video chat with you”, “your font is really small”, and such. I then wanted to capitalize on the video camera and called my cat in, who mikie is well acquainted with to say hi. I then swept the camera around my room and he commented on what I was wearing. We chatted about a concert and did comment on the performance of the app once more when Mikie compared it to an old delayed news feed.
The conversation mainly concerned the novelty of the camera on my end. Deciding to make it more of an Aim experience, I created a chat room with Mikie and our friend Syed. Once we got in, Mikies first bubble was “is this it?” I believe he was unsure from the simplicity of it. Syed sent us a barrage of links to images, and eventually Mikie and I decided to hang up.
I was excited to have him on Aim since I had been trying to get him to create an account for awhile. I was even more excited to show him Miss Fierce (my cat) and my room to him. It was an interesting juggle of interfacings for me, I was video chatting with Mikie, so was talking to him through speaking to my computer while needing to type to syed (which Mikie could see too) while reading their responses. There was a point where I almost shouted at syed through my computer, then remembered that I needed to type my responses to him.
Mikie was a little tired, so I felt like I was dragging him through the woods, but then he would get caught up on a topic and not seem so exhausted. I also thought that he would be annoyed at all the typing, He’s not a very good speller and thought that he would be frustrated by that. To the contrary he told me that he thought typing was faster than talking and he enjoyed this experience because of the facial expressions he got to see and the fact that I could let him see what my world looked like on the other side of the coast. When I asked him is he would do it again, I got a resounding yes, and he promised to get a webcam for the next time. His only critique was that the one-sided video chat caused a delay in the sense that I would read the bubbles, respond and be onto another topic before he could write something in response. I however liked the fact that no one could talk over me, and vice versa.
After the interview call he texted me later “honestly that communication was the closest i’ve felt with you in awhile, there is something important about seeing a face”.
Also worth noting is, when I called him back to do the interviewing, he hung up with “It was nice to see you”, that right there had an impact on me since he would never of been able to say that unless we were in the same state.