Digital Intimacies
Authors: Rambukkana Nathan , Wang Keer 
Published: September 2020

To speak of “digital intimacies” is to acknowledge two premises, both foundational to communication studies. The first is that media of communication not only significantly affect the content of communication, but also are themselves meaningful. The second is that media of communication become articulated to the processes they interact with. Applying the first premise here posits that digital intimacies have a character of their own, due to their digital nature and its corollaries: coding, technologies (both ephemeral at the software layer, and concretized or embodied), platforms, design, networks, algorithms, etc. The digital in this figuring encompasses everything from programming to software communities, from individual to world-spanning networks, from microprocessors to robots. And every aspect of this digital nature leaves traces and transformed intimacies in its wake. Applying the second premise posits that digital intimacies have become, in addition to a particular subtype of intimacy, also a particular subtype of communication, and one that needs to be studied in its own right. Conjoining the concepts, thus, means that while the digital has transformed practices of intimacy, intimacies have equally infected the digital, guiding and inflecting its growth and spread at a fundamental level. Intimacy can mean many things (and the specific Genealogy of the Concept of “digital intimacies” is broken down in the following section), but for the purposes of a general gloss, intimacy can be taken to mean closeness, proximity, interconnectedness, connection. Digital intimacies can mean phenomena as narrow as fandom subreddits and as broad as international news publics. It means both the digital mediation of intimate matters such as sexuality and kinship, as well as topics one might not consider intimacies per se, but are nonetheless about kinds of interconnectedness, such as thinking through the costs/benefits of online voting platforms for democracy, or the surveillance issues inherent to using smart passports for border control. It is simultaneously broad and narrow, expansive and focused. It has interests in the past, present, and possible futures—even in fictions, and the new configurations and contortions that intimacies can be imagined into in (among others) science and speculative fictions. The study of digital intimacies, separately and—increasingly, radically—together, both opens up an exciting vein for new scholarship and creates opportunities to revisit older work that can be reclaimed and considered as part of this frame. An emergent field, it is significant to—in addition to communication studies—many other fields including cultural studies, sexuality studies, women’s and gender studies, Internet studies, game studies, platform studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and political science. Note: While a small number of the works and chapters in this bibliography address digital intimacies outside the Global North/West, this (in conjunction with a paucity of sources not originally in English) should be seen as a limitation of the bibliography as currently constituted and an area for future expansion of this entry.