Impersonal Intimacy: Habit and the Mobile Digital Device

Abstract

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 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.