Textures of intimacy: witnessing embodied mobile loss, affect and heartbreak

Abstract

This chapter focuses on different “textures” of digital intimacy heartbreak — encompassing various forms of heartbreak and sadness, loss and mourning. The reflections in this chapter draw from qualitative interviews, ethnographic fieldwork and workshops with regular users of visual mobile media, carried out between 2008-2016 in Melbourne, Madrid and Oslo. These insights around feelings of mobile intimacy are magnified in the affective witnessing of selfie-as-eulogy in the South Korean ferry disaster of 2014. To analyse how lives and loss played out online affects structures of feelings and feelings of intimacy, we draw on the theoretical literature relating to intimacy and affectivity within feminist media studies.