Intimacy among strangers

Mobile telephone calls in public places often entail the revelation of intimate details about the caller's life to strangers. This article reports some results of the authors eavesdropping on mobile phone calls in public places and also takes the first step into analysis of the fascinating mix of visibility and inaccessibility, intimacy and alienation that is the mobile telephone call in a public place. The article discusses how this intimacy among strangers may be understood using Goffman´s concepts of impression management, involvement shields and civil inattention.