Mobile Intimacy

So here is one of the paradoxes of mediated globalization: at the same time as it connects people, it also distanciates them. (Rantanen 10) Introduction Mobile technologies are changing personal relationships and intimacy. While many authors critique the benefits of globalization from either corporate or cultural perspectives, I follow Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman in assessing globalization from the standpoint of the personal. ‘Mobile intimacy,’ the ability to be intimate across distances of time and space, is a global phenomenon. Oddly enough, the sociability of mobile telephony is not homogenous across the world. How the mobile phone is used to extend personal relationships in Asia/Pacific is unique compared to the rest of the world. As Misa Matsuda notes in her discussion of mobile phone (keitai) phenomenon in Japan, this technosocial dynamic is creating a dependency of ‘fulltime intimacy.’ At its crux, this essay applies Giddens’s cornerstone of time-space distanciation to research on mobile telephony to demonstrate how globalization threatens some personal relationships. An ‘economics of emotion’ arises where capitalistic uses of technologies alter power within personal relationships. Love becomes a commodity which is subject to economic rules of supply and demand. Love, however, is not synonymous with intimacy; it is only a component. Ultimately, I see globalization leading towards not a homogenized identity (Schiller) but an obfuscating of identity, where some individual float through a consumerist abyss marked by the acquisition of goods (Lasn). If the non-linearity of late modernity has transformed love into a commodity, then how does the commoditization of love into the realm of the mobile affect how one negotiates intimacy? This essay begins with a summary of time-space distanciation literature. From there, it challenges Giddens’s (“Transformation”) postmodern concept of the ‘pure relationship’ and how it differs from Victorian intimacy. The main argument then expresses how technologies like mobile phones sever some emotional relationships while solidifying others. Last, this paper concludes by analyzing how globalization has created what I term ‘stable instability,’ whereby the ‘disjuncture’ of modern times allows some cosmopolitans to establish emotional order through being in constant flux. In short, the utopia of global communications, particularly in Asia, is to some extent a fallacy when one considers how new technologies hinder some personal relationships. Time, Space, and Place in Globalization The reallocation of time, space, and place through new media is the bedrock for mobile intimacy. It is necessary to summarize some key theories to contextualize my argument. In The Consequences of Modernity, Giddens coins ‘time-space distanciation’ as a prerequisite for modernity. He describes it as “the conditions under which time and space are organised so as to connect presence and absence,” (14). Critical to his argument is ‘disembedding,’ which he defines as “the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space” (Ibid: 21). Similarly David Harvey (“Postmodernity” 201-308; “From Space to Place) writes of ‘time-space compression’ where new phases of technologies decrease the space between places and thereby reduce the time between those places. He adds an economic stance by incorporating Baudrillard and Ford as examples of how commodities’ origins cease to matter as time and space compress and give rise to global markets. John Tomlinson, Terhi Rantanen, and Malcolm Waters critique the differences between time-space distanciation and compression. Distanciation remains a crucial theoretical gripe for Tomlinson because it overvalues the need for proximity within both identity and communication. Although Waters presents a valid argument over the connotation of “distanciation,” for the purposes of this paper, the terms will be used interchangeably. Place becomes less significant because the time traditionally required to cross a distance shrinks, removing the added value an action receives when it takes more time. Time remains a commodity which adds emotional significance to place. Proximity therefore becomes a crucial variable in the economics of emotion. New media yield different types of communication. For place to lose significance, mediation must gain value. “Mediation is therefore seen as, fundamentally, a matter of bridging time and space in communication” (Tomlinson 152). John B. Thompson (81-118) demarcates communication into three types: Face-to-face interaction (henceforth FtF) – dialogical, spatial-temporal co-presence multiplicity of symbolic cues. Mediated interaction – dialogical, spatial-temporal distancing, limited symbolic cues. Mediated quasi-interaction –monological, spatial-temporal ambiguity, limited symbolic cues. While the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought increases in mediated quasi-interaction like newspapers and television, the twenty-first century charges towards interactivity. There is now an eruption in dialogical and multi-flow communications rather than the traditional one-way flow of mass media dissemination. Through new technologies like instant messaging and VoIP, people (with access) are increasingly redefining their interactions in mediated space. Rather than adopting a technologically deterministic view like Walter Ong and McLuhan whereby the technologies themselves denote the societal effects, Silverstone (“Sociology of Mediation”) argues that digital communication provides more choices which require ethical decisions. In short, Thompson’s three types of communication are necessary to have a sense of place and identity. In The Transformation of Intimacy, Giddens surveys how late-twentieth-century love has evolved from Victorian ideals due to time-space distanciation. Do changes in love also affect intimacy? Gross and Simmons (533) agree with Giddens’s argument that trust has become the more valued commodity as mediation places greater emphasis on “physically absent others.” Unlike Giddens, Gross and Simmons’s study empirically evaluates how ‘expert systems’ affect personal relationships and that trust is no longer a necessity (534). Giddens argues that globalization has brought about a volte-face from ‘romantic love’ to the ‘pure relationship,’ which he defines as: A social relation is entered into for its own sake, for what can be derived by each person from a sustained association with another; and which is continued only insofar as it is thought by both parties to deliver enough satisfactions for each individual to stay within it. (58) His view of Victorian ‘romantic’ love as a supernatural extension of eroticism is limiting as it only focuses on one facet of love. “Giddens’s… treatment of the transformation of intimacy in modern societies focuses on personal ‘face-to-face’ sexual and love relations and has nothing to say about mediated experience,” (Tomlinson 170). Surprisingly, Gross and Simmons’s research concurs with Giddens that the ‘pure relationship’ offers the potential for greater happiness; however, their data do not support the dystopian risks Giddens advocates: Our study failed to turn up any evidence that the transformation of intimacy is in fact a double-edged phenomenon. People in pure love relationships are, so far as our data indicate, happier with their relationships and no worse off on a number of psychological measures than those in more traditional relationships… We suspect that Giddens may be overestimating the psychological importance of habit, routine, and predictability in people’s lives. (551-2) Although their study bears its own methodological limitations, it provides a counterexample to Giddens’s argument. Despite their results, I am skeptical to discount Giddens’s argument so quickly. Some of the research in Asia indicates that habitude is epicentral to intimacy. Mobile intimacy decreases habitude for many people. In Habuchi’s discussion of technologies in Japan, he notes that this reduction of the habitual is creating a phenomenon of shrinking social capital which he dubs ’telecocooning.’ The Battle over Proximity Proximity remains important around the world, and new corporate technologies like HP Halo and Cisco Telepresence typify the desire to have digital communication simulate FtF communication. In Harold Innis’s pioneering work on types of communication, he demarcates ‘orality’ as the first form of communication with FtF as the primordial communicative medium. Innis understood that proximity is essential to many facets of life. Similarly, Thompson acknowledges that FtF communication allows for the subtle reading of body language. On the other hand, Tomlinson believes that people overvalue proximity because they consider only its sexual nature (163-4). He prefers to consider proximity from the point of view of the ‘global village’: [Proximity] describes a common conscious appearance of the world as more intimate, more compressed, more part of everyday reckoning – for example in our experience of rapid transport or our mundane use of media technologies to bring distant images into our most intimate local spaces (3) The quandary arises over whether proximity facilitates the communication of emotion. For example, saying “I love you” and texting “I love you” have different connotations based on body language. One cannot discount the value of nonverbal cues. Within corporate cosmopolitanism, global nomads seldom gain proximity to local culture because they are constantly in a ‘new floating world’ (Gergen) or in a bubble of global consumerist culture of Hilton hotels and McDonalds (Tomlinson 7). Tomlinson (111) disagrees with Augé, arguing that non-places like airports, train stations, hotels, chain restaurants, cafes, and shopping malls create ne