Can Online Environment Ever Match the Intimacy Established by Relationships Face-to-Face?

"From Your Own Experience, Can the Online Environment Ever Match the Intimacy Established by Relationships Face-to-Face? Why?"
Author's Name
The Institutional Affiliation
Course Number and Name
Instructor Name
Assignment Due Date
Comparison of Intimacy in Online and Face-to-Face Relationships
The modern world has become more nomadic and globalized due to advancements in communication technology. The smashing innovations in technologies have brought massive twists in terms of ease in communications among people. With remarkable innovations in internet technologies, mobile phones, social media applications, voice and video calling facilities, communication protocols, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, VPN, and the development of security soft wares, humans are enjoying a remarkable level of comfort in interactions among relations despite vast physical distances. Now is the time when human beings are trying to make distant communicational experiences equivalent to real-life face-to-face interactions. These technological advancements have given strong hopes that one day scientists will make online communication so realistic and genuine to create an environment that matches the intimacy established by face-to-face relationships. This paper aims to deal with the hindrances in approaching this goal and the prescience of how technological development is promising enough to make it to the point where people can establish the same intimacy in relationships through online communication, which they feel in face-to-face interaction.
It is a common observation that people tend to multitask during online interaction. In a face-to-face setting, talking to someone can gain more attention because of fewer distractions and more involvement due to the body language and sense of approachability. In a digital interaction, the lack of physical presence makes the bond weaker, and people try to reach out to their phones or try to accomplish other tasks during the interaction. Sometimes an unwanted advertisement from a local brand or an invitation from another friend can cause the concentration to be lost, which creates a sense of being unimportant and unwanted and destroys the intimacy among relationships. At the same time, face-to-face interactions create a more valuable and engaging environment because of prompt responses and a sense of availability and attention, which helps to create a better intimacy in relationships.
Adjusting or turning off the notifications, using filters to avoid unnecessary advertisements and pop-ups, and keeping the search engines private can be helpful to avoid such distractions. This issue needs significant research and effort to be resolved yet, but looking at the other factors of technological advancements, it does not seem to be impossible. The development of different computer viruses, which help to delete a particular form of data easily, makes us hopeful to be able to have such mediums that will reduce the distracting factors during an online interaction and thus will help to create the intimacy as it is in a face-to-face scenario.
It is certainly not affordable for humans to be exposed to anyone at any time. Affable discussions about your soon-to-be-born baby, informing a dear one about the savings kept in a cupboard at home, planning your honeymoon with your spouse, or a simple conversation about some low points or guilt in your life with a close friend, tend to develop a stable intimacy among relationships. If we consider a few professional environments too, such as a business meeting, a discourse about the forethought of the strategies to win a sport championship, a conference of military procedures or war and defence strategies, in all such discussions, building enough trust to share some practical relationships is important. In all such cases, privacy stays a basic concern and is more preserved in a face-to-face setting and communication because of better chances to realize any threat and to control the situation promptly. In online communication, however, such conversations cannot take place due to the fear of hackers and data theft since there are many such soft wares and programs which can easily steal data from the communicational platforms, which is a real problem in creating the same intimacy in online interaction.
Nonetheless, it is expected that with the recent growth in technology, these needs will be addressed and will provide possible solutions to these major setbacks of online communication. There are many improvements in this regard, like keeping records of the callers and making default privacy settings stricter. We can limit the access of our information and content to "friends-of-friends" and can even block unwanted intruders. Value-sensitive designs based strictly on the values of privacy concern and identity management systems are a big achievement in this regard. Tools like "Tor" allow communication and browsing to stay anonymous. The risk of hackers has been reduced with end-to-end encryption. However, much still has to be improved in this regard, and the progression of technology is very promising to assure this. The development of VPN, cybersecurity, and military-grade security in the future seem to sufficiently address this threat and successfully create a secure online environment to enable the same intimacy in online interactions as in face-to-face relations.
Being a part of different educational systems both as a facilitator and a student, the biggest problem I have observed is the passive engagement of the audience in online communications. During the prevailing pandemic conditions where the whole world had to resort to online educational strategies, I observed that monitoring and engaging people in online environments became difficult due to being at a distance physically. A face-to-face interaction involves a higher sense of responsibility at the end of both the speaker and the listener, demonstrates the importance, addresses sensitive issues, and gathers feedback that is not the same in an online environment. Students working on a project preferred physical interactions and instructions rather than online; asynchronous feedback was considered more helpful than synchronous communications (Thomas & Macgregor, 2005). It is important to be self-disciplined to get better benefits of an online interaction which is not always the case. Online interaction has larger chances of distractions due to the lack of typical association that is developed through personal contact and difference in the environment and surrounding situations of the individuals. Although the reason might be shallow and irrelevant information, too, in face-to-face communication, people usually pay more heed and participate more actively in a discussion or activity going on.
This drawback of online communication might be overcome in the coming years by making the audience more involved and engaged in the content of online interaction. I have found many interactive games and software developed to make online learning more engaging. Developing filters and software that can block any undesired acti...