Constant connection as the media condition of love: where bonds become bondage

Abstract

Lovers’ capacity to connect with each other over distance has increased drastically with the proliferation of digital media. This augmented capacity to build connection with a distant other has become an important condition of romantic relationship in our time. This article explores the implication of constant connection as a media affordance for romantic relationship by examining media use among young Chinese lovers. Based on in-depth interviews with young Chinese lovers, it argues that constant connection contributes to a continual sense of togetherness between romantic couples as they continually engage in phatic communication, but that it intensifies lovers’ negotiation of intimacy and individuality by pushing their personal boundaries on one hand and cultivating an intolerance of separation on the other. Overall, this article contributes to the scholarly conversation about media technology and human intimacy by offering a critique of social media based on the inner dynamics of romantic relationship.

Keywords

China constant connection copresence intimacy romantic relationship perpetual contact phatic communication social media

Lovers’ capacity to connect over distance has increased drastically with the proliferation of digital media. This augmented capacity to build constant connection with a distant other has become an important condition of romantic relationship in our time. However, this media condition, what Katz and Aakhus (2002) call ‘perpetual contact’, has been inadequately engaged in the study of romantic relationship. Studies that examine the links between digital media and romantic love tend to focus on online dating between strangers (e.g. Ben-Ze’ev, 2004; Kaufmann, 2012). Many examine impression management and deception in online venues separate from the offline world (e.g. Ellison et al., 2006; Hall et al., 2010). These scholarly works underscore the modern anxiety over disembodied intimacy and the perversion of romantic love in the digital era, but they offer limited insights into the experiences of those who use media as a supplement to face-to-face interaction. Research that does study media use in ‘offline’ romance tends to examine the content of couples’ communication and the effect of specific media channels on relationship satisfaction (e.g. Jiang and Hancock, 2013; Laliker and Lannutti, 2014). With notable exceptions (e.g. Duran et al., 2011), few studies investigate how constant connection as a media affordance impacts romantic relating. Lovers who desire unity whenever apart are likely to mobilize multiple channels to communicate with each other, what Haythornthwaite (2005) terms as ‘media multiplexity’. The concentration of media channels in intimate relationships epitomizes ‘perpetual contact’ as the characteristic of the current media ecology.

This article offers a critique of ‘perpetual contact’ as a modern problem of romantic relationship by examining the media experiences of young Chinese lovers. It is based on in-depth interviews with 44 Chinese undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals (26 women and 18 men) aged from 20 to 35 in Beijing from 2011 to 2014, a period of time when keeping connected became increasingly convenient and affordable to the Chinese. China as a latecomer to modernity is fast in adopting digital technology and has the world’s largest number of Internet users, with a total of 649 million by the end of 2014 (China Internet Network Information Center, 2015: 1). Like much of the world, young and well-educated people are most likely to use their cell phones to access the Internet (Pew Research Center, 2012). Although many foreign-based social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter are banned in Mainland China, homegrown social media platforms have flourished and offer Chinese users multiple ways to connect with each other (see Crampton, 2011). China’s censorship of the Internet may have restrained the political expression of the Chinese, but the mundane use of digital media for entertainment, commerce, and relationship maintenance thrives.

Mobile technology is deeply embedded in the daily life of the Chinese. In 2011, there were 73.6 cell phones in use per 100 people in China; in 2014, the penetration rate increased to 94.5%, with a rate of 100% in 10 cities/provinces (China Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, 2012, 2015). Chinese people use mobile phones to maintain all sorts of social connections, including family, close friends, work relations, and peripheral social ties (Bell, 2006; Xia, 2012; Yuan, 2012). Text messaging or short messaging system (SMS) has been very popular among the Chinese, including low-income communities such as migrant workers (Pew Research Center, 2012; Wallis, 2013). Similar to findings in other countries such as Norway, young Chinese adults tend to use texting for expressive purposes and emotional support more than older users (Ling, 2010; Xia, 2012). Recent development of the mobile Internet has led to a decrease in SMS traffic because popular mobile applications offer even cheaper messaging services (Wu and Wan, 2014). For example, Wechat, a social application similar to WhatsApp, provides users with free text/voice messaging services, video chats, and photo sharing. For many Chinese, especially the young and well educated, constant connection is both technologically possible and economically feasible.

The enhanced capacity for connection offers opportunities for many young Chinese to construct romantic intimacy while negotiating with modernity and tradition. For instance, cell phones offer young rural-to-urban migrant workers a ‘private’ life that is otherwise impossible in their communal living spaces (Wallis, 2013). Mobile messaging enables the Chinese to express emotions that would be embarrassing in face-to-face context according to traditional etiquette (Xia, 2012). As young Chinese are disembedded from traditional social structures and endowed with increasing social and geographic mobility (Yan, 2010), digital media become an important part of their romantic relating (see Donner et al., 2008 for a similar observation about middle-class Indians). However, mediated romance entails its own risks. To understand these risks in light of the current media condition, researchers need to examine the inner dynamics of romantic relating. As this article will argue, constant connection afforded by digital media contributes to a continual sense of togetherness between couples, but it also intensifies their negotiation of intimacy and individuality by pushing their personal boundaries on one hand and cultivating an intolerance of separation on the other.

Mediation and intimacy

Scholarly concerns about the impact of modern communication technology on human intimacy are not new. Horton and Wohl (1956) coin the term ‘para-social’ relationship to describe the seemingly personal relationship cultivated by radio and television programs between audiences and media performers. Gergen (2002) warns that print, radio, television, and the Internet have created ‘a pervasive state of absent presence’ that diminishes our close bonds with significant others (p. 240). However, Gergen excludes cell phones from this criticism and argues that cell phones have the potential to create boundaries around intimate relationships because users often limit access to their numbers and share only with their close circles. Unlike Gergen, who regards the cell phone as a savior of human closeness in a world of growing contact with strangers, Bauman (2003: 62) argues that mobile phones provide easy and frequent connections that ‘tend to be too shallow and brief to condense into bonds’. According to Bauman (2003), the quick contact through text messaging epitomizes human bonds in what he calls the ‘liquid’ stage of modernity, or ‘liquid love’, characterized by transient connections rather than committed relationships.

A more recent articulation of similar concerns is Turkle’s book titled Alone Together. Turkle (2011) argues that electronic media encourage the human tendency to bypass the messiness of face-to-face interaction, create dependence on technology rather than other human beings, and hence leave individuals in a constantly connected but lonely state. Similar to Bauman, Turkle believes that convenient contact deprives individuals of opportunities to learn about human emotions and relationships in their full complexity. For both scholars, constant connection afforded by digital media encourages lesser forms of communication and weakens human intimacy.

In contrast to the gloomy prospect of human intimacy depicted by such terms as ‘liquid love’ and ‘alone together’, Broadbent (2009) argues in a Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) talk that digital media enable intimacy: they allow people to talk with intimate partners in time and space that are otherwise regulated by such institutions as factories and schools. In other words, ‘perpetual contact’ is a blessing because people can remain in touch with their loved ones even when modern institutions prevent them from doing so. Similar to Gergen’s prediction about cell phones, Broadbent and Bauwens (2008) find in their ethnographic study in Switzerland that texting and instant messaging are largely used in close relationships as intimate channels for emotional exchange and a continuous sense of companionship.

To what extent these contradictory claims about constant connection and human intimacy can be reconciled is an empirical question, the answer to which is contingent upon whether social media replace or supplement face-to-face interaction. Rather than attempting to resolve the contradiction between the claims, this article joins this conversation by proposing a third perspective and focusing on the relational dynamics between media users. It follows Broadbent’s ethnographic approach but regards intimacy as a process of negotiation and meaning making rather than a zero-sum game of time allocation between impersonal institutions and personal relationships. To this end, my analysis draws upon the rich scholarship of interpersonal communication, particularly works on the everyday practices of relating and relational dialectics.

Meaningful nonsense in digital messaging

As young Chinese couples start to date, a noticeable change in their communication is the increase of ‘sweet nothings’. Many interview participants described their texts and instant messages as mostly ‘silly nonsense’ or ‘chats without substantial content’. Typically, these ‘nonsensical’ and ‘unsubstantial’ chats contained mundane routines of everyday life: greeting in the morning, making lunch arrangements at noon, sharing things of interest during the day, and reminding each other of bedtime in the evening. The number of these ‘nonsensical’ messages is quite formidable according to the participants, especially those who used free messaging applications such as QQ instant messenger (hereafter QQ IM) and Wechat. For instance, Wangtao, a female college student, had 12 folders of chat records, each containing about 600 pages of word files, although her relationship had started only 3 months before. There were deeper and longer conversations in the records, what Wangtao described as ‘communication of souls’. She took screenshots of these messages and saved them in a photo folder on her computer. Compared to the total of over 700,000 pages of chat records, the number of her screenshots just surpassed 300. In terms of volume, the ‘heart-to-heart’ conversations were overshadowed by the ‘nonsensical’ chats.

Despite their triviality, these mediated chats have important relational meanings. They serve what Malinowski (1923) and Jakobson (1960) call phatic function: couples keep in touch and reaffirm their relationships by constantly engaging each other’s attention and establishing psychological contact. Xiu’er, a female college student, described the increase of ‘nonsensical’ chats as an indication of growing intimacy: ‘It’s a blessing to have someone listen to your nonsense’. Importantly, the phatic messages facilitate lovers’ sense of ‘being together’, with signs and symbols indicative of their individuality and relationship history. Nicknames, personal idioms, forms of address, and language styles may all reference their shared experience, invite inferences of relationship meaning, and enhance their cohesiveness and intimacy in a succinct manner. Duck (2002) likens these referential and inferential functions of everyday mundane conversations to ‘hypertext’ to illuminate their expansive nature. Like the blue links that expand upon the click of a mouse, mundane chats call upon what is not said but available to the interactive parties as shared histories and meanings (Duck, 2002). Couple’s regular rehearsal of these ‘relational capsules’ through various media keeps their relational histories and meanings alive.

Besides the continuous flow of personal codes, digital messaging enables quasi-synchronous chats so that it is possible for lovers to ritualize such daily activities as morning greetings, dinner conversations, and bedtime kisses over distance. Chinese college students living in gender-segregated dormitories found mediated chats and kisses at night especially meaningful, partly because they were not otherwise possible. Same-sex dormitories are quite common in Chinese colleges, and they recall the principle of sex segregation in traditional Chinese thought, a principle that regulates heterosexual romance and continues to be implemented in modern institutions of collective lives such as factories (Mann, 2011). Digital messaging enables college student lovers to maintain their dating relationships across the socio-geographic boundaries.

Routine everyday talk is mundane, but it is the bedrock of identity construction and relationship building (Wood and Duck, 2006). Everyday conversations contain interpersonal rituals and condensed messages with relational codes. These patterned interactions and meaningful messages make it possible for couples to quickly coordinate emotionally and relationally, what Ling and Yttri (2002) call hyper-coordination. Digital media extend these mundane rituals over distance and enable ‘a connected intimacy’ (Crawford, 2009: 256). For young Chinese lovers, constant connection through such chatting devices as texting, QQ IM, and Wechat promises a sustained sense of being together, despite the distances imposed by institutional arrangements and geographic mobility.

Real-time sharing and the limitation of immediacy

Constant connection enables ‘real-time’ sharing. Compared to older media such as the letter, text messages, telephone calls, and video chatting software afford synchronous or quasi-synchronous interaction so that young Chinese lovers can keep each other on the same page of their lives as they experience the moments. If catching up transforms individual experiences into relational knowledge (Sigman, 1991), ‘real-time’ sharing enables constant catching up so that couples need not wait until they get together physically to talk about their individual lives (Ling and Donner, 2009). ‘Real-time’ sharing enables a new mode of mediated togetherness that is characterized by immediacy, but it also makes a high demand on lovers’ management of time and attention.

‘Real-time’ sharing can take various forms. Photo sharing is a popular one. Beautiful sceneries, delicious food, and funny activities are common subjects of the photos shared by young Chinese lovers. For geographically dispersed couples, sharing photos helps to ‘synchronize’ their separate lives, to quote Luojia, a male college student in a long-distance relationship. Besides photo sharing, young Chinese couples also use text messages and voice calls to update each other about their lives in ‘real time’. For example, Yawen, a professional editor, maintained a strong sense of intimacy with her newlywed husband, who worked in a foreign country, through QQ IM and phone calls. They sent to each other messages about what came up in their lives and how they felt via QQ IM throughout the day, and talked on the phone during lunch breaks and in the evening. With the messages sent in ‘real time’ and regular chats over the telephone, physical distance struck the couple as no barrier to their psychological closeness.

The prototypical form of ‘real-time’ sharing is perhaps video chatting. Young Chinese lovers use video chatting services such as those provided by Skype and QQ IM to not only see and hear each other but also do things together. With video chatting turned on, some couples shared pictures or links to online news, music, and videos in the instant messaging dialogue box, others used the ‘screen share’ function of Skype to read the same news stories together, and still others synchronized online video on their computer screens so that they could watch the same digitized television program together.

Young Chinese couples also engage each other in offline activities during video chatting. Some interviewees cooked dinners, had meals, tried on new clothes, and even slept while keeping video chats on. Their partners on the other side of the screen offered opinions, comments, and companionship while they went about these activities. To some extent, the live streaming of images and sounds facilitated their participation in each other’s everyday life from afar. This sense of participation is illustrated well by the example of Shenjie, a professional woman who travelled a lot on business and liked to communicate with her fiancé through video chatting whenever she returned to the hotel room. During a business trip to Tokyo when an earthquake was underway, Shenjie and her fiancé kept the webcam on while she slept so that he could watch over her and alert her in case of danger. The monitoring webcam gave the couple some power to intervene into each other’s offline life.

Sometimes young Chinese lovers’ video chatting involves minimal interaction. After starting a video chatting session, couples may do their own things, such as reading online news, playing online games, and working on school projects. They may take a look at each other occasionally and then return to whatever they are up to. In these cases, words and images become less important than the simulation of physical closeness, or proxemics. Physical proximity is a sign of social closeness. An extended video chat session simulates physical closeness with what Dertouzos (1998) calls electronic proximity. Goffman (1963) has noted similar situations in face-to-face context and coined the term lapsed verbal encounter to describe these instances: people walk next to each other in the street without talking or fall asleep beside each other on the beach. Lapsed verbal encounters are expressive of relational closeness because parties do not have to search for safe topics to discuss but they have the right to start an interaction whenever they please, what Goffman (1963: 89) calls the ‘preferential communication rights’. In the same vein, lovers’ extended video chat session with minimal interaction is characterized by lapsed verbal encounter, albeit mediated by communication technology. In ‘lapsed video chats’, lovers are electronically proximate and socially accessible to each other. Couples grant each other the right to command their attention even at the most solitary moments such as writing and sleeping.

With audial, visual, and sometimes textual channels converged in one multi-modal application, video chatting demonstrates versatility in helping lovers create a sense of togetherness in ‘real time’. Recent criticism of video chatting often focuses on its failure to enable eye contact because users can either look at the image of each other or the camera but never both (e.g. Pettman, 2009). This criticism is sensible evaluation of video chatting as the technology of presence, that is, the simulation of physical existence, but it misses the relational underpinnings of its use. Relationship partners use video chatting to create a sense of togetherness, that is, as the technology of copresence (Zhao and Elesh, 2008). The lack of eye contact is hence less important (think of lapsed verbal encounters) than the lack of availability to share the moment in real time.

The problem with ‘real-time’ sharing, however, is that parties may not be able to experience the moment fully while sharing it with a distant other. At the crux of the issue is the limitation of human attention. Copresence, as Goffman (1963: 22) notes, ‘renders persons uniquely accessible, available, and subject to one another’. ‘Real-time’ sharing via video chatting demands behavioral (staying in the proximity of a digital device in a comparatively private space) and cognitive (readiness to be summoned) orientation to the distant lover. This often leads to conflicts between life ‘here’ and life ‘there’. Gaoyuan, a graduate student, for instance, would refuse her husband’s request for a video chat when her homework needed her full attention.

Sharing experience with a distant other in ‘real time’ means having the ‘here’ controlled by the ‘there’, at least partly. The lure of being together over distance and the remote control it entails often put lovers in a double bind, particularly in the case of video chatting. Many interviewees noticed a tethering effect of video chatting and complained about its tendency to linger. Yawen and her husband, for example, decided to quit video chatting and to talk only on the phone because the cost of international phone cards could make them better aware of the time spent in getting connected. Putting a limit on ‘real-time’ sharing made it easier for the couple to negotiate between being here and being there, being together and being apart.

Negotiating accessibility and its relational meanings

Technological accessibility does not necessarily mean social accessibility, as many scholars have noted (e.g. Licoppe, 2004; Zhao and Elesh, 2008). Who can contact an individual and who cannot – the personal boundaries – are largely regulated by social norms and conventions. Access is an indicator of social closeness, and frequent contact is often a sign of intimacy. The relational meanings of keeping connected and the media affordance of constant connection make boundary negotiation particularly difficult for young Chinese lovers.

Technology is social partly because the designers have built into the technology their assumptions about how social relationships should be conducted (Gershon, 2010). Contact lists, privacy settings, and friends’ circles all demarcate social distance and accessibility. An exemplary design of access control is the status display. Skype, for instance, offers five options including ‘online’, ‘offline’, ‘invisible’, ‘do not disturb’, and ‘away’. Each of the statuses is indicated by an icon, but ‘offline’ and ‘invisible’ share the same indicator. This ambiguity of status icons is found in other chatting services as well, for instance, ‘sign out’ and ‘invisible’ at Gmail hangouts, and ‘offline’ and ‘invisible’ at QQ IM. The designed ambiguity gives users some leeway in negotiating constant connection.

Appearing ‘online’ implies availability for interaction. Online presence signposted in a circle of social contacts is an implicit statement about one’s accessibility. Being ‘online’ but not responding to an invitation to chat may give rise to attribution of intentions. This is particularly true for lovers, who tend to make relational inferences when their partners do not reply to their summons. For example, Chengang, a male college student, told me that a lack of response from his girlfriend ‘online’ at QQ IM would make him wonder whether something went wrong in their relationship. Failure to connect, when one is able, means failure to love. The relational implication of the absent response bespeaks the moral accountability of lovers’ online presence: presence, or rather, being seen as present, entails the obligation to connect. The ‘online’ status display makes one’s online presence visible, and the visibility subjects one to relational expectations.

‘Invisible’ as a status display option is particularly useful in preventing social expectations because it may pass as ‘offline’. Although ‘do not disturb’ and ‘away’ make explicit statements about users’ unavailability, the former conveys a harsh tone, and the latter implicates possibility for delayed interaction. Neither implication, however, is likely to be drawn if the user is online but ‘invisible’ (read offline). By veiling online presence, the ‘invisible’ status display serves as a polite way of setting social boundaries. It allows IM users to screen out unwanted requests of chats, like the answering machine that reverses the ‘caller hegemony’ in telephone interaction (Hopper, 1992). In fact, it is a common practice for young Chinese to set ‘invisible’ as the default status display at QQ IM. It is a shared secret that appearing ‘offline’ does not necessarily mean being offline in reality.

For romantic couples, however, the ‘invisible’ status display does not necessarily prevent them from contacting each other; rather, it enables discriminatory online connectivity. Many interview participants interacted with their romantic partners via QQ IM while both parties remained ‘invisible’. Some developed regular schedules; others sent trial messages despite the status display; still others used the customizing tool at QQ IM to appear ‘online’ only to their partners. Lovers’ online interaction behind the facade of invisibility accentuates the exclusive access they grant to each other and the exclusive relationship they construct within their social circles.

Because etiquette is not always applicable in intimate relationships, negotiating boundaries is especially hard for young Chinese couples. Connection as a relational indicator and a technological affordance both shapes their negotiation of boundaries. The experience of Xiaoma and Pengfei, a graduate student couple, provides a good illustration. Xiaoma often used QQ IM to share files and notices with co-workers at an information technology (IT) lab while setting his status as ‘invisible’. He was curious for a long time why he would always receive messages from Pengfei as soon as he logged in. As it turned out, she was using Rainbow QQ, an enhancement software program that revealed invisible online contacts by locating their Internet protocol (IP) addresses. Xiaoma was concerned about his work but could not ignore Pengfei’s demand of attention because work was not a valid excuse in their relationship. With the dual demand of work and love at the same time, Xiaoma often postponed his responses to Pengfei’s messages and slowed down their conversation exchange in order to discourage her expectation of a ‘real-time’ chat. The purposeful delay of response turned what could have been quasi-synchronous chats into asynchronous messaging. The temporal allocation of attention and accessibility – chronemics – constituted Xiaoma’s strategy of managing boundaries between work and love as spatial segregation ceased to work.

Rainbow QQ presents an example of how technological inventions and economic incentives subsume media users’ desire to connect with loved ones. Rainbow QQ was developed by a competing company of Tencent, the developer of QQ IM, and the spy software caused heated debate between the companies and lengthy lawsuits, which ended in the loss of Rainbow QQ on the ground of unfair competition (Netease, 2011). Although the incident of Rainbow QQ was brought to an end by the court, its moral implications need further exploration. When media technology encourages human curiosity about ‘truth’ behind the thin veil of politeness, personal boundaries are easily trampled. For lovers who desire a certain fusion of personal boundaries, the spy software exploits their search of love and turns it into love of searching and surveillance.

Young Chinese lovers often negotiate with media technology as they negotiate their relationships. The design change in QQ Mobile, a mobile version of QQ IM, reflects those negotiations. QQ Mobile came out without the setting of status display. The assumption was that mobile users were always online as they carried around their mobile devices. The removal of status display options received many criticisms from QQ IM users. A joke that circulated on the Web about QQ Mobile is that a woman (note the gender implications) has a breakdown because her boyfriend is always online but never replies to her messages. An ‘online’ status display is more than technically being online; it is an indicator of social accessibility. The developers later restored a modified version of status display in its software updates, with the two choices of ‘online’ and ‘invisible’. The ‘invisible’ (or ‘offline’) status again restores situational constraints on social interaction when users are technologically (and relationally) accessible anywhere and at any time. Media technology coevolves with the human needs, first for connection and then for autonomy.

Social relationships consist of ceaseless interplay of contradictions or relational dialectics, as Baxter and Montgomery (1996) have noted. One of the contradictions identified by the authors is autonomy-connection, the tendencies of relationship partners to be together and to be apart. The contradictory tendencies constrain and enable each other because social relationships entail interdependence between individuals but also require individuals to have some autonomy. While Tencent adjusted its mobile application to accommodate the users’ needs to appear offline, it is questionable whether being offline is possible in the digital culture of connectivity. With the cornucopia of media available, lovers are able to contact each other through other means if one channel fails to connect them. The relational entitlement to each other’s attention makes lovers’ communication a quintessential example of what Katz and Aakhus (2002) describe as ‘perpetual contact’. When couples negotiate their boundaries, they have to negotiate with the media ecology characterized by constant connection.

The unbearable silence and the gendered discourse of connection

The flip side of being connected is being out of touch. While young Chinese lovers negotiate personal boundaries, they also have to manage moments when contact cannot be established. Increased connectivity means increased vulnerability. As Licoppe (2004: 145) notes, constant connectivity poses ‘a new threat’ to relationships because every failure to access the partner suggests a failure for the relationship to be resumed from a previous instance of connectedness. The unbearable silence and its emotional consequences are part of the media package that comes with constant connectivity.

In my interviews with young Chinese, even college sweethearts who lived on the same campus and spent much of their daytime together found it distressing to be momentarily out of touch. They would continuously send messages, make phone calls, or try various channels in order to reach their partners unless the latter had announced unavailability in advance. Their intolerance of silence often led to the multiplication of media use. Bolter and Grusin (1999: 84) call this captivation with media hypermediation, a term that illustrates how users’ desire to achieve immediacy often ‘passes into a fascination with media’. The constant production of messages (and calls) and the impatience with separation feed upon each other.

Young Chinese find it difficult to be out of touch partly because of the ambiguity of silence in mediated chats. To use the term of Danielsen and Maasø (2009), silence in mediated chats may be textual silence – the scripted or intentionally performed silence, or media silence – silence resulting from the technological failure. The absence of a reply indicates unknown possibilities: Is the lover well? Is the relationship all right? These concerns have not changed much since the time of letter writing. What has changed is the acceptable time of waiting. As digital media reduce the time of message transmission almost to nil, the threshold beyond which lovers start to worry about no response has dropped from weeks or days to hours or minutes.

The unbearable silence and the subsequent contact are common causes of conflict between young Chinese and their romantic partners. Couples often had to negotiate the meanings of silence and contact. For example, Xiaoqi, a female college student, had her first big fight with her boyfriend because he called her over 20 times when she got together with her friends. He called to check on her, but she did not hear the rings. Not knowing what went on, he kept calling. She was angry upon seeing the long list of missed calls because she took the calls as a sign of interference of her personal life; he was angry because she did not appreciate his concerns for her while she was out of contact. Frequent contact had different meanings for the couple: it was an act of care for him but an impingement of independence for her. Different needs of autonomy and connection in close relationships may cause frictions that follows a demand–withdraw pattern, and the frictions become more hurtful when parties interpret each other’s behaviors according to their own rules (Caughlin and Vangelisti, 2000; Wood, 2013). While digital media facilitate connection, they also exacerbate conflicts between lovers’ demand for and withdrawal from it.

The impact of silence on lovers’ moods and emotions is particularly pronounced in long-distance relationships. Compared to couples who can see each other everyday, those in long-distance relationships move in and out of each other’s physical presence more explicitly and consciously. Many long-distance romantic partners found it useful to maintain a clean divide between time-together and time-apart before social media became prevalent (Sahlstein, 2004). However, the divide becomes increasingly hard to maintain as digital media enable distant lovers to keep in constant touch. The enhanced sense of unity over distance goes together with the intensified feeling of separation when couples fail to contact each other. Constant connection promised by digital media deepens the feeling of isolation when the promise is not fulfilled.

The intensified sense of unity and isolation is illustrated by the experience of Yawen and her husband. Maintaining frequent contact everyday through instant messages and phone calls, Yawen tried to impress on me that long-distance couples were no less, if not more, intimate than couples living close to each other. On the other hand, she also elaborated on her strong sense of loss and frustration when she could not contact him. She described what it was like for her the last time her husband’s telephone cards ran out of minutes:

I seemed to have kept calling him, calling him, calling him. Then, it seemed like I couldn’t get the phone through, but still (believed) it would, it would. But he would tell me on QQ and in email, no card, no card, no card.¹

The repetitive phrases in Yawen’s recount of her experience illustrate the angst and frenzy of a lover whose connection with the loved was failed by an error in the otherwise smooth running media system. It was not even a technological failure as big as an Internet shutdown or telephone line damage. It was a tiny human neglect, but it disrupted the seamless world of constant connection and revealed the fragility of absent presence. Yawen’s manic dialing of phone numbers (or clicking of the ‘call’ button on video chatting services in other lovers’ cases) manifests how the promise of constant connection renders silence problematic. Alternative channels may provide some reassurance of lovers’ presence, but they may also reinforce the impossibility of immediate contact. Moments of connection failure reveal the reality of physical distance and the fragility of mediated togetherness. In moments of communication breakdown, mediated contact becomes contact with media.

The impact of connection failures on lovers is also gendered. Feminine individuals tend to desire more connection and less autonomy than those who are socialized to be masculine in romantic relationships (Wood, 2013). This gender difference seems to shape lovers’ media experiences. In the narratives of the young Chinese, women are more likely to expect faster response and to react strongly to delayed replies. Popular jokes and idioms related by the interviewees were revelatory of the gendered discourses. One joke went as follows: a man panicked when he saw a text from his girlfriend because it was received 2 minutes ago (a long time for her!), whereas a woman continued to chat with her friends when she saw her boyfriend’s message received 20 minutes ago because he could wait a bit more. The narratives of gendered expectations of immediate response construct women as inclined to connection (if not dependence) and prone to be influenced by loss of contact with their romantic partners.

When men were criticized for their demands of connection, they tended to be described as womanlike. One example is the story of Ruonan, a female college student who just broke up with her boyfriend. What directly triggered their breakup was an episode familiar among undergraduate lovers. She was busy with organizing activities at a student organization when he called her many times. He then sent her angry messages and complained about her ignoring his calls, whereas she regarded his continuous calling as immature, needy, and girlish. Clearly, what Wood (2013) describes as a gendered orientation to connection was interpreted as a gendered aptitude for dependence. The slippage from relational orientation to the lack of individuality sheds a negative light on those who prioritize connection to autonomy in relationships.

For young Chinese women who value individuality as part of their personal identities, the gendered discourses of connection and dependence may prevent them from articulating their relational needs. For instance, Yanling, a female college student who just ended a long-distance relationship, told me of her reluctance to express concerns about her relationship when her ex-boyfriend’s messages became increasingly short, scarce, and slow in response because she was afraid of presenting herself as a pathetic woman with no autonomy but irrational considerations of the ‘trivialities’ of communication. The claim of a woman’s individuality and the gendered discourse of connection poses a double bind for young Chinese women like Yanling while they negotiate personal identities and romantic relationships.

The gendered discourse of connection among the young Chinese suggests that constant connectivity as a characteristic of current media ecology may have more impact on women than men. This is not only because women tend to prioritize connection in romantic relationship, hence feeling more isolated when the technologies of connectivity fail them. This is also because women’s orientation to connection may invalidate their claims of individuality as a modern identity when popular beliefs of autonomy confound sociality with dependence. While social media call upon human desires for connection, they also create a dilemma for lovers, and especially women. On one hand, digital media encourage a relational culture where connection is the default and separation is problematic. On the other hand, connection is blamed as a gender defect when parties feel their personal boundaries encroached upon by constant connection.

A conclusion

Quick contact and short messages are not necessarily lesser forms of communication than face-to-face conversations, contrary to what Bauman (2003) and Turkle (2011) suggest. The mundane messages in lovers’ mediated chats may be meager in content but profound in relational meanings. They contain ‘relational capsules’ and constitute relational rituals that enact and reaffirm intimacy. Even in lapsed video chats, couples construct closeness by mutual orientation and subjection to each other. Constant connections solidify romantic relationships and create a continual sense of ‘being together’ while couples are apart.

The continual sense of togetherness, however, does not necessarily enhance intimate relationships so far as an intimate relationship is a process of parties’ joint construction rather than an automatic result of remaining connected as Broadbent (2009) implies. Having a relationship means exposing oneself to the needs and values of the other, but for the relationship to continue, one’s own individual needs and identities should also be attended to. Constant connection afforded by digital media weighs upon the relational dialectics toward connection, which, at the same time, thrusts the other end of the binary to the fore. It pushes lovers’ personal boundaries and encourages an intolerance of separation. As a result, it intensifies couples’ negotiation between togetherness and separation and between relationship and individuality.

The problem of constant connection for romantic relationship is the shrinking of distance between lovers rather than the lack of depth in their communication. As Peters (1999: 168) notes, the central dilemma of modern communication is not about ‘relations between minds’ but ‘relations between bodies’. The case of young Chinese illustrates the problem of the body in two ways, both suggesting the fragility of love in the digital age.

First, constant connection implicates not only spiritual contact but also bodily control. It promises lovers a continual sense of copresence; but copresence between separated bodies, or what Zhao (2003) calls corporeal telecopresence, operates on the basis of attention economy. Lovers’ capacity to simultaneously attend to the ‘here’ and the ‘there’ may grow as their multitasking skills improve, but attention as a finite resource of mortal beings will not. While Gergen (2002) applauds cell phones for their capacity to recreate boundaries around close ties, the boundaries between intimate partners themselves tend to evaporate as digital media keep them in ‘perpetual contact’. When personal boundaries are pushed, gendered attribution is often made about connection with a slippage toward immaturity and lack of individuality. Constant connectivity presents a relational paradox for lovers, particularly for the feminine partner. Lovers may adopt personal strategies to negotiate their accessibility, and media developers may design features to conceal bodies online. These are local adjustments made to counter connection as the default and to forestall relational inferences about failed contacts. As digital media break the spatial-temporal barriers to lovers’ attention, new situational constraints need to be constructed for intimate contact.

Second, constant connection increases the gap between the spiritual and bodily aspects of romantic love. The augmented capacity for connection eliminates the distance between lovers as communicative instruments, but the distance between lovers as physical beings remains intact. Kafka has famously written about the dilemma when modern telecommunication achieved great success in the early 20th century. In a letter to Milena Jesenska, he laments, ‘after the postal service it (humanity) has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the wireless. The spirits won’t starve, but we will perish’ (Kafka, 1953: 229). Kafka’s complaint anticipates lovers’ anxieties in the digital age. The anxiety of waiting for the mail is reduced, but the fear of losing contact becomes even more prominent. Since disembodied togetherness is contingent upon the flow of mediated chats, any disruption to the flow is likely to lay bare the physical expanse between couples and the absence of their bodies. From the letter, the telegraph, and the telephone, to the Internet, the cell phone, and the mobile Internet, modern communication technology continues to enhance lovers’ capacity to connect over the distance, but the binaries of love also continue to move apart. The closeness of words and the remoteness of bodies characterize love in constant connection.

These risks of constant connection are not likely to be specific to young Chinese lovers, although they may have been intensified by China’s compressed modernity, particularly the explosion of digital technology and the increasing importance of romantic relationship as individuals are disembedded from traditional social structures. American college students, for example, are found to struggle with autonomy and connection in romantic relationships as cell phones raise their expectations about each other’s accessibility (Duran et al., 2011). Cell phones may also cause entrapment for nonromantic friendship. Research on American undergraduates shows that cell phone use can increase the intimacy between close friends, but it may also lead to overdependence (Hall and Baym, 2011). In fact, constant reachability enabled by mobile phones is a cross-cultural conundrum, although it may manifest more acutely in some cultures than others (Baron and Hård af Segerstad, 2010). More research needs to be done to understand the extent to which different types of intimate relationships are overburdened in different cultures, as media converge on a single mobile device and media use concentrate in close relationship.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Professor John D Peters and the reviewer for their insightful suggestions for revising the manuscript.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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