Tijelo od riječi: Elektronička poruka kao medij intime?
A Body of Words: En Electronic Message as a Medium for Intimacy?

Summary/Abstract: The text documents and partly analyzes the relation of e-mail users to those characteristics of electronic correspondence whose different realizations might imply the possibility or impossibility of actualization/maintaining the intimacy, the depth of the relationship and the closeness of the correspondents in e-mail communication. The text is about the feeling of having one’s own privacy protected, about the communicational width of e-mail in the sense of reachability of various addressees, about the ways of opening of the correspondents in e-messages, about the relation of e-mail to the oral communication and about the possibility of keeping and archiving of electronic correspondence. The assumptions about information technology and computer mediated communication — as much as they work on "connecting people" — wipe out the intimacy and create alienation — prove to be dependent on various, and in the case here analyzed, individual circumstances and personal features, as well as the allegation that computer mediated communication strengthens the links between people proves to be dependent on the context. By connecting technology with user practices it is possible to show that people accept technological products in different ways, modifying their presupposed functions, accepting or rejecting certain of their possibilities. So the question whether an e-message is a medium for intimacy becomes in a way a question for every e-mail user individually, and it is the intent of this paper to show that "intimacy" can not be given or taken over by purchasing a product or learned through an instruction manual, but it is created by interaction with others and, in a way, with oneself.

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