Southerton, Clare
Description
The growing presence of smartphones and other mobile digital
devices, always within reach and already deeply embedded in
everyday life, has been met with considerable anxiety. Concerns
have been raised that we are perpetually distracted by our
devices, alienated from the intimate relations that are proper to
human sociability and that, consequently, social life as we know
it is being irrevocably changed. Though often charged with
distracting us from the social...[Show more] world, this thesis considers the
way that habitual encounters with devices open the user to a new
kind of intimacy, which I refer to as ‘impersonal intimacy.’
Impersonal intimacy, I suggest, is formed not as a personal
relationship to humans or indeed things, but is a kind of
intimacy generated through the mundane repetitions of the
everyday. It provides the conditions in which mobile digital
device-user relations as we know them are made possible, sparked
by minute inclinations and facilitated by generative repetitions.
This impersonal intimacy reconfigures awareness and generates new
desires.
In exploring the new modes of relationship emerging as a result
of the proliferation of mobile digital devices, the thesis
contributes to significant debates in sociology, in which the
call is made for an expanded view of the social that is attentive
to preindividual forces and emergent social realities. These key
challenges for the discipline arise from technological and social
change, but also from theoretical debates questioning some of the
deeply held ontological assumptions within the discipline. My
thesis contends that dominant sociological accounts grounded on
human consciousness, take human-to-human interaction as their
object, and see devices as playing, at best, a mediating role in
this interaction and, at worst, a destructive role. In responding
to calls for an ‘expanded empiricism’, this thesis proposes
an evaluation of the mobile digital device that takes seriously
the impersonal forces that constitute the device-user encounter.
The kinds of impersonal intimacy formed through our close
connections with everyday things challenges the priority usually
given to distinct forms, focusing instead on the expression of
forces in a given moment. I argue that it is crucial that we
reconsider what constitutes the ‘social’, given that the
familiar organising concepts of ‘social actors’ and
‘objects’ fail to account for the complex, never fully
formed, relations in which these device-bodies are constituted.
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