Mediating the presence of others: Reconceptualising co-presence as mediated intimacy

Abstract

Drawing insight from queer and media studies, this article analyses data from the UK study Adults’ Media Lives. The authors claim that this study reveals the significance of people’s intimate relationships to their media practices, highlighting in particular how people’s media practices mediate the ‘presence’ of others. The authors put forward the concept of mediated intimacy to capture both the cultural intimacy people have with media and the mediation of intimacy by media practices. Mediating intimacy has implications for normative conceptions of intimate life, including the significance of ‘time’ to the values of ‘home’ and ‘work’.

Queering the Map: Stories of love, loss and (be)longing within a digital cartographic archive

“…In this way, an ambiguous landscape of queer dialogue emerges (see also Attwood et al, 2017;Dobson et al, 2018), made intimate because of these ambiguities: in who stories are written and made visible for, in where and when they are posted, on when (or if) the story took place. The storymap thus allows queer visibility to be experienced across and beyond the site, we argue, as a spatial and affective vocabulary that, in its atemporality, challenges chrononormativity and unsettles the norms of public and private gaze (see, Freeman, 2010;Lee, 2016; see also Cefai and Couldry, 2019;Haber, 2019). Through cartographic visualisation, recounted memories are grounded in the real world -in places familiar and strange -rather than left entirely untethered in the reader's imaginary; and these desires live in the ever-present as an ongoing and lively digital trace.…”

“…Holding these together, we aim to illuminate forms of engagement within QtM, made possible by, and in spite of, the technologies of the platform. In doing so we see how connection and belonging are mediated through narrative in anonymity, and in turn, how anonymity is unsettled through/within connection (see also Attwood et al, 2017;Cefai and Couldry, 2019). It is within this tension, between anonymity and connection, that we position QtM as a lively archive of queerness.…”

Interacciones digitales en un contexto transnacional: Prácticas comunicativas de estudiantes internacionales en Barcelona

“…De este modo, se hace patente la propuesta de Burchell (2017) sobre el orden relacional, puesto que los estudiantes internacionales desarrollan un entendimiento claro y diferenciado acerca de los patrones y acciones de comunicación a las que recurren en sus interacciones mediadas durante su tiempo en el extranjero. Hay que recordar también que, conforme la clasificación de Burchell (2017), en las interacciones de los informantes la tecnología ejerce como una herramienta social que les permite consolidar nuevos vínculos y mantener los que tenían antes de iniciar su experiencia internacional (Cefai y Couldry, 2017).…”

What is visual intimacy?

“…Mediated intimacies are forms of closeness that ensue when personal connections "are made possible through the sorts of digital platforms designed to network people" (Attwood et al, 2017, p. 250). In other words, media and communication technologies are used as means for building and maintaining intimate relationships (Barker et al, 2018;Cefai & Couldry, 2019;Chambers, 2013). Th is is a transformation that some authors see Lobinger, Venema, Tarnutzer and Lucchesi Article: What is visual intimacy?…”