Abstract
Although ‘intimacy’ has been often construed as the relationship between two individuals, we contend that these are also ‘social’ and are always imbricated in broader social dynamics. In Asia, the social dimension of intimacies, whether romantic, familial, or communal, is very much pronounced. Crucially, it is also increasingly enacted through mobile media. We argue that these ubiquitous mobile technologies have contributed to the transformation of intimate social relationships in the region. We underscore especially that they have become central to people’s experiences of what we call ‘glocal intimacies’. By this we mean that such technologies have both normalised and intensified how people’s interpersonal relationships are entangled in the ever-shifting and constantly negotiated flows between global modernity and local everyday life. This is particularly evident when they seek to use mobile media to reconfigure their local ties and to enact global relationships. These experiences powerfully exemplify how their mediated intimacies are caught between the homogenising influence of the global and the persistent grounding of the local.
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Cabañes, J.V.A., Uy-Tioco, C.S. (2020). Mobile Media and the Rise of ‘Glocal Intimacies’ in Asia. In: Cabañes, J.V.A., Uy-Tioco, C.S. (eds) Mobile Media and Social Intimacies in Asia. Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1790-6_1
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