ABSTRACT
This chapter considers space and time as social dimensions and the ramifications of imagining intimacy as a space-bound phenomenon. Intimacy is forwarded as a substantive good and a practice that protects and promotes friendship. The chapter begins by exploring the connection between friendship and time, arguing that friendship is experienced as duration. As a result, friendship can be viewed as a durée of communicative acts that bring two people together. Time consciousness has changed and evolved alongside the correlative shifts in communicative technologies, and the chapter then reviews this evolution and how it has altered our perceptions of time and space. The implications of altered perceptions of time and space have altered our experiences of friendships and our experiences with our friends, with implications for our physical bodies in space and the felt sense of distance (phenomenological distance/intimacy). At the end, a discussion of silence in the mediated realm and its connection to intimacy and distance ensues.
