The Intimacy of Using Mobile Devices

Seattle.
The final panel at AoIR 2011 for today begins with Guillaume Latzko-Toth, whose interest is in mobile devices and the notion of intimacy. By mobile devices, he means mobile digital information and communication devices: portable, hand-held devices through which media is accessed and collaboratively produced. Mobility doesn’t simply mean moveability or portability in this, but rather, this refers to devices which are used while the user is mobile. Such devices are digital and versatile; they are app-enabled.

By intimacy, on the other hand, Guillaume refers to the dimensions of proximity, contact, and privacy. Mobile devices are a technology of proximity, and at the same time we are in a proximity relationship with them – mobile devices are close to us in a spatial sense, in an emotional sense, and in a metonymical sense; we wear them on us, or keep them very close to us, we are closely attached to them emotionally, and they are similar to us to the extent that the represent and encapsulate our identity.

We can keep close to other people through the use of these technologies; because they are close to us, we can never get away from them, and thus become always contactable. They are technologies of proximity: teenagers, for example, text their friends to acknowledge proximity, creating a sense of being together at a distance; location-based apps also enable people to discover one another in their immediate environment (the social networking app for gay males, Grindr, is one obvious example here).

We have contact with these devices: they touch us (through vibrating alarms, for example), and we touch them, through their haptic interfaces. While recent touchscreen-based interfaces have made physical buttons disappear, this has only led to a proliferation and multiplication of virtual buttons on screen. And when phones vibrate to alert us to a call or message, are we simply interacting with the phone itself, but physically interacting with another person, mediated through a chain of actants?

Finally, mobile devices cement a shared intimacy in this way; mobile messaging creates spaces of intimacy between its users. In the process, privacy and publicness are blurred; micro-private spaces can be created in public spaces, while supposedly private messages and interactions can be placed in a public context. Mobile devices reconfigure the way intimacy is experienced and performed.