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Week 4: Connection, Infrastructure, and Touch

Mandatory Reading

  • Chambers, D. (2013). Social Media and Personal Relationships. Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137314444
  • Chapter 1 “Technologically Mediated Personal Relationships.”
  • Duffy, B. E., & Chan, N. K. (2018). “You never really know who’s looking”: Imagined surveillance across social media platforms. New Media & Society, 21(1), 119–138. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818791318
  • Chan, L. S. (2021). The politics of dating apps: Gender, sexuality, and emergent publics in urban China. MIT Press.
  • Introduction.
  • Jewitt, C., Leder Mackley, K., & Price, S. (2021). Digital touch for remote personal communication: An emergent sociotechnical imaginary. New Media & Society, 23(1), 99-120. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819894304

Furthur Reading

  • Abidin, C. (2021). From “networked publics” to “refracted publics”: A companion framework for researching “below the radar” studies. Social Media + Society, 7(1), 1–13. DOI: 10.1177/2056305120984458.
  • Jewitt, C., & Leder Mackley, K. (2019). Methodological dialogues across multimodality and sensory ethnography: digital touch communication. Qualitative Research, 19(1), 90-110. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794118796992
  • Ley, M., & Rambukkana, N. (2021). Touching at a distance: digital intimacies, haptic platforms, and the ethics of consent. Science and Engineering Ethics, 27, 1-17.

Advanced UG Version

  • Duffy, B. E., & Chan, N. K. (2019). “You never really know who’s looking”: Imagined surveillance across social media platforms. New Media & Society, 21(1), 119–138. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818791318
  • Søraa, R. A. (2017). Mechanical genders: how do humans gender robots? Gender, Technology and Development, 21(1-2), 99-115.
  • 🎞️Watch: The Social Network (2010)

Rationale

I started with the "obvious" association of "intimacy" with interpersonal and intimate connections. In this regard, Chamber's (2013) and Duffy and Chan's (2018) works have presented important referential points of analyzing netizens' online relationships with others and selves. Furthermore, Chan’s (2021) introduction provides a useful review of “networked intimate publics” beyond the context of dating apps.

The selection of Jewitt et al.'s (2021) piece may need extra unpacking here. I saw the word "touch" in Rambukkana's symposium presentation abstract and found it quite interesting to explore, as it not only speaks to both the tangible and the intangible but also evoke the affective image of a longing hand. Some of the materials attending to psychology and social work are intriguing but do not go along well with the others in this module. Nevertheless, I could see how they continue the previous discussions on long-distance relationships while proving helpful for modules concentrated on care and self-care.

In retrospect, it also evokes the question of how to bridge, as Jewitt and her colleagues (2018) contend, the understanding of digital touch as technologies and as communication. Their efforts have witnessed a useful pool of outputs at least since 2018, with such diverse genres as editorial, spesicial issue introduction, and manifesto. I finally selected this one because of its heuristic approach that most speaks to my goal of meaning-making of intimacy through the eyes of users themselves, which also demonstrates an essential method of knowledge production apart from the other selections.