Intimacy,Cosmopolitanism,and Digital Media: A Research Manifesto

Introduction

Recently, a host of publications have explored digital media and intimacy, suggesting an “intimacy turn” in media studies (Hjorth & Lim, 2012). In this article, I explore how much of this scholarship cautiously refuses to rigorously theorize the concept, and consequently, it appears remarkably ambiguous. How can we understand the way technology transforms intimacy when its qualities are already so fluid?

Intimacy is an ethical problem. Not just because it involves virtues, happiness, or the regulation of morals. Its ethical dimensions are evident in the existential work of writers such as Simone de Beauvoir (1948) and Emmanuel Levinas (1979). Although quite different in many ways, these philosophers both conceptualize ethics in terms of one’s foundational responsibility to the Other. Ethics involves balancing the Other’s freedom with one’s own. It involves grappling with the Other’s mysterious alterity and agency. It is the task of recognizing, respecting, and willing this alterity without attempting to master it. When people become intimate, they of course become embroiled in this ethical process.

Inspired by Peter Sloterdijk, I argue that intimacy is a “being-with” (mitsein) inside an ideal sphere. Here certain freedoms are enriched over time through a shared history. Other freedoms are challenged, especially the capricious and selfish whims of the individual. The encounter between intimates and non-intimates is similarly ethical. It is the clash of border zones, the pull of surface tensions, and the mobilization of defense systems that protect different spheres. This is a dialectic between inside and outside, a formalism that is today best expressed as intimacy and cosmopolitanism.

This dialectic is more necessary than ever in a world of increased migration caused by transnational labor and perpetual wars. Many of us live in highly multicultural cities and societies. It is not difficult to find evidence of this situation leading to serious conflicts both offline and online in the form of cyber-hate and ideological extremism (Citron, 2014). Beck (2011) argues that we must take up a Kantian cosmopolitan imperative: cooperate or fail! Yet like Kant, Beck frames cosmopolitanism in terms of an “egoistic interest in survival.” He does not explore the virtue of living well and cohesively together in contexts that are not exhausted by the threat of existential risk.

In today’s “global cities” (Sassen, 1991), we are often faced with the task of what Hall (2008) calls “constant translation” with multicultural others. We do not live in culturally pure spaces, but in what Appadurai (1990) calls culturally heterogeneous “scapes.” Bauman (1995) argues that the intermingling of multicultural strangers may give the illusion of a socially cohesive, multicultural community. Yet in reality, the stranger is “Janus faced,” with one face providing an exhilarating spectacle of difference and another provoking fear and the desire to retreat back into the safety of the intimate home.

A similar problem can be found in the fibers, codes, and discourses of our network society. Connolly (2000) argues that the rhizomatic structure of the Internet is capable of cross-cutting concentric spheres of belonging such as neighborhoods or nation-states, enabling transnational forms of cosmopolitan sociality. Yet Connolly leaves one searching for examples of these seeds coming to fruition. Indeed, there are cultural, political, and technological issues that place limits on a person’s desire to navigate flights through the rhizome. Recently, Zuckerman (2016) has shown that the Internet gives us what we want, but not necessarily what we need. We usually pay attention to things that “unfold nearby and directly affect ourselves, our friends, and our families” (Zuckerman, 2016, p. 20). Our attention shifts toward intimacy, not cosmopolitanism.

Hence, the dialectic between intimacy and cosmopolitan emerges portentously in the age of digital media and urbanization. It challenges us to understand the ambiguity of intimacy, its ethical dimensions, and its technological relationship to cosmopolitanism. This article takes up this challenge in the vein of a research manifesto. I am inspired by works such as Haraway’s (1991b) Cyborg Manifesto that seek to produce a critical conceptual scheme that focuses attention on both the material and discursive influence of new technological paradigms and suggests new modes of critical enquiry. The article plays out in three parts. First, I explore the ambiguity of intimacy. Second, I develop a formal metaphysics of intimacy and cosmopolitanism. Third, I explore how this helps disclose a variety of new research opportunities. Principles of critical, imaginative, collaborative ethnography are applied to various digital media, which I classify in terms of algorithms, interfaces, sensor infrastructures, and robots.

The Ambiguity of Intimacy

Intimacy is promiscuous in media scholarship. It seems to be essential in describing a range of transformations in everyday life. Yet when reaching for concepts to describe intimacy media, scholars appear just as promiscuous. Intimacy succumbs to nebulous predications. Despite this, a series of core debates can be discerned within the literature, each with particular ethical claims. Intimacy is both ambiguous yet fixed within the parameters of particular ethical arguments. A tour through some key digital media scholarship will suffice to illustrate this point. This tour will be presented as a kind of tracing, beginning with the popular notion that intimacy involves presence. This tracing does not attempt to give intimacy an essential structural center in terms of its qualities. I wish to reveal how intimacy is inflected with what Derrida (1976) calls différance. With every attempt at fixing intimacy with some essential quality, a new and different quality emerges.

Since antiquity, notions of presence have been critically associated with media technologies, beginning with language and the written word (Peters, 1999). Presence is posited by digital media scholars as essential to intimacy, or perhaps even synonymous with it. Yet presence itself is a complex and debated concept, with various qualifiers of its own. Witness terms such as “telepresence” (Mantovani & Riva, 1999), “virtual presence” (ibid), “locative presence” (Farman, 2009), “augmented co-presence” (Ito, 2003), and “intimate visual co-presence” (Ito, 2005). Milne (2010) argues that intimacy requires a psychological sense of another person’s bodily presence. This need not require physical co-presence. Milne describes how embodiment can be evoked through written media via various rhetorical strategies. Descriptions of modulations in bodily affect—the roughing of cheeks, the pulsing of hearts—can evoke intimacy in letters to a distant paramour. Hjorth, Wilken, and Gu (2012) similarly explore intimacy as an interpersonal experience of physical or psychological presence, with a particular focus on how mobile and locative media provide a real or imagined sense of proximity. The authors also explore the way that mobile media keep us constantly connected to our intimate ties, producing a sense of “ambient intimacy.” They are perhaps inspired by early Japanese studies of the mobile phone as ketai: “a snug and intimate technosocial tethering, a personal device supporting communications that are a constant, lightweight, and mundane presence in everyday life” (Ito, 2004, p. 3).

For scholars such as Milne and Hjorth, presence is discursive and performative. It can be discursively constructed through categories such as gender (Hjorth & Lim, 2012), labor (Gregg, 2011), and sexuality (Pertierra, 2006). It requires discursive skill, particularly where image sharing and conversation is concerned. Crawford (2009) argues that intimacy is built through a particular kind of conversational presence expressed as continuous “insignificant chatter” and the “sharing of the everyday.” This phatic communication serves more to strengthen bonds than convey meaningful content. This is evident on microblogging sites such as Twitter. Users both disclose mundane information and also continuously “listen” to the background chatter of their social groups. Again, there is a sense of ambient intimacy. Chambers (2013) argues that, in facilitating practices of disclosure, social media reflect a modern ideology that commends self-disclosure as a means of producing rewarding intimate relationships. Social media broadcast disclosures to large groups of friends. Hence, they extend the modern aspiration that friends can and should share personal self-disclosures, locating friendship as a critical form of modern intimacy.

These writers generally agree that discursive skill and media literacy allows people to construct rewarding forms of presence and intimacy online. Others are more concerned about the corrosive effect online interactions have on physical co-presence. Turkle (2011) famously argues that online communication undermines offline intimate social skills. Turkle (2015) emphasizes the primary importance of mastering physically copresent dialogue to truly commune with others. Jamieson (2013) similarly argues that online self-disclosure can only produce a “thin intimacy.” She argues that intimacy is a “being together” based in “care through practical acts” and “demonstrating affection physically.” Unlike Turkle, who prioritizes conversation, Jamieson emphasizes the primacy of physical touch for establishing “thick intimacy.”

Touching is of course related to sexual presence, and this has received increasing treatment in the age of virtual sex and hook up culture. In his exploration of gay hook up apps, Race (2015) argues that ephemeral sexual encounters fall well within the domain of intimacy, as these produce “affective intensity.” Like many media scholars, Race warily refuses to define intimacy, yet predicates it with a host of terms such as emotion, affect, bonding, attachment, care, and commitment. Nevertheless, sexuality is at the core of his argument. Hook up apps are simultaneously “infrastructures of sex” and “infrastructures of intimacy.” Race is attuned to the popular idea that sexuality is the catalyst of romantic intimacy (Solomon, 1990).

Perhaps more than any other form of digital media, online dating has focused attention on the relationship between intimacy and sex. This in turn encourages oppositions between love and lust, and debates around commitment. Scholars of love such as Illouz (2007) argue that online dating commodifies intimacy. The intimate Other appears in profile photos like items for sale. The lightning strike event of falling in love is foreclosed by the fine-grained prefiguration of the perfect partner that occurs when establishing one’s romantic interests to assist in algorithmic matchmaking. According to Badiou (2009), this creates a risk free ideology of love akin to “the idea of ‘smart bombs’ and ‘zero dead’ wars” (p. 7). Note the heavy dose of ideology here. In fact, studies have found that people with little prior romantic success find love and commitment through online dating (Baker, 2005). Race (2015) also makes a subtle argument that there are continuums in the gay hook up community between “stranger sociability” and committed relationships.

Throughout many of these explorations of intimacy, there is a related concept of risk. Contrary to Badiou, Couch, Liamputtong, and Pitts (2012), probe the way in which those seeking both ephemeral and long-term relationships must negotiate risks such as sexual disease, violence, rejection, and heartbreak. In their exploration of how American youths utilize a variety of mobile apps to enter into and sustain relationships, Gardner and Davis (2013) argue that intimacy has become completely entangled with the risk of opening oneself up to others. This comes with potential threats such as bullying, trolling, and doxing. The authors define intimacy as a risk-imbued yet ultimately rewarding movement away from isolation and loneliness. Indeed, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han (2017) argues that love is fundamentally constituted by the existential risk of opening oneself up to the Other and all the deep transformations this involves.

As the cliché goes, it is always risky to put one’s heart on the line, especially publicly. Many of the early discourses around social and mobile media considered how users understood privacy risks (Christofides, Muise, & Desmarais, 2012; Govani & Pashley, 2005). Many scholars associate intimacy with privacy, and are concerned with what happens to intimacy once it becomes entangled with what Boyd (2011) calls “networked publics.” These figurative public spaces often cause different intimate social contexts to implode (Lambert, 2013). This is profoundly relevant for those who practice marginalized forms of intimacy, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people and “sexual refugees” who have fled their parents and their homelands for the sake of love (Dhoest & Szulc, 2016).

In a rather blunt diagnosis, Rosen (2007) argues that intimacy is essentially a private experience. Intimacy is corrupted whenever it is opened to the public gaze. Rosen believes that public friendship is an “oxymoron,” and that the performance of intimate life publicly is a form of narcissism. Rosen seems ignorant of scholarship that locates the development of modern friendship in public and often commodified spaces of leisure and entertainment (Allan, 1988; Paine, 1969), what Oldenburg (1989) calls “third spaces.” More subtly than Rosen, Gershon (2010) argues that cultural values around intimacy and privacy change as people explore new technologies. Young people see online spaces as an opportunity to experiment with autonomous intimate relationships beyond the watching gaze of their parents. Social and mobile media establish new “idioms of practice” in which shared “behind the scenes access” to information between close ties is negotiated according to new modes of establishing trust. The establishment and betrayal of trust becomes an essential struggle in the politics of intimate life. It seems that intimacy can be construed as both private and public depending on the ideologies of both the researcher and the cultural group being researched. And then there is the question of just how to distinguish between private and public, especially given how they may bleed into one another and take on each other’s qualities through digital media (Gregg, 2011). On their own, concepts of public or private life seem unable to provide stable ground on which to build a theory of intimacy.

The literature mentioned so far has all assumed that intimacy involves a relationship between two human beings. Even expanded definitions of intimacy such as Herzfeld’s (1997) concept of “cultural intimacy” are fundamentally about social dynamics. However, intimacy can also be mobilized as a phenomenological term to describe a completely personal experience of media technology. For example, Bull (2005) uses intimacy to describe the experience of listening to a Walkman or iPod while walking through an urban space. Here intimacy is a sonic bubble, providing a sense of immediacy and nearness, and protective safety against the sensory cacophony of the city. Being in this bubble produces a sense of comfort and agency. “Through the power of sound the world becomes intimate, known and possessed” (Bull, 2005, p. 350). This non-human, phenomenological use of intimacy is often used colloquially when describing familiar spaces or objects. For example, Van House and Churchill (2008) discuss the way social media users have an intimate relationship with digitally archived content, mostly because of the emotional memories this content evokes.

Once intimacy is defined phenomenologically and psychologically, various non-human media are able to solicit intimacy. Feminist science and technology scholars such as Suchman (2011) have deftly explored how the anthropomorphic animation of robots can solicit a sense of intimacy. This is central to Steven Levy’s (2008) work, where he speculates that within decades, sexual and loving relationships with lifelike androids will become the norm.

Many of these writers are located within predominantly Anglophone traditions. There are non-Anglophone studies of media in which intimacy is defined differently according to diverse cultural contexts. Much of this research reflects the anthropological tendency to think about intimacy in terms of family, kinship, marriage, and gender. For example, the capacity for mobile phones to strengthen family and kinship networks has been examined in various contexts, and of course the meaning of family and kinship changes in each one. For instance, Horst and Taylor (2014) describes the complex web of familial mobility enabled by mobile phones in Haiti and the Dominican republic. Here, phones become essential in orchestrating the family as both a social and economic unit that must engage in periodic migrant labor. Intimacy cannot be separated from the relationship between familial obligation, care, commitment, and economic exchange. Market activities often require lakou interactions with non-kin—an essential aspect to the politics of intimacy—and mobile media become a new mode of lakou. Indeed, lakou encompasses a kind of digital threshold between intimacy and cosmopolitanism.

Digital media have also become a key resource for maintaining intimacy at a distance between families who have migrant children or parents (Madianou & Miller, 2011). Studies of this phenomenon are excellent at bringing out culturally specific understandings of the relationship between space and intimacy, as they target intimacies that have been displaced. For example, Nishitani (2014) investigates Tongan families who have Children residing in Australia. Tongan familial intimacy is conceptualized in terms of a figurative spatial closeness that exists despite actual distance, referred to as vā. This complex ontology is essential for how intimacy is mediated. Breaks in transnational communication or care—say, when a child does not send money to parents—are regarded as breaking the intimate space, or “Kuo motu hona vā.”

Non-familial intimacy is not a purely Western pursuit. For example, East-Asian youths are large-scale users of social media, and accumulate broad groups of friends. Yet, as Lim and Basnyat (2016) argue, online interactions with these friends are regulated by culturally specific impression management strategies that can be analyzed through diverse concepts of face, translated as man, lian, or mianzi in China; izzat in India; tiamen or mentsu in Japan; chemyon in Korea; and nâa in Thailand. For example, mianzi places more emphasis on honor, while mentsu is about harmony and respecting the social hierarchy. The authors note that East-Asian concepts of face share a concern with protecting the faces of others. For instance, lian in China means having a responsibility toward protecting not only one’s own social dignity, but the dignity of one’s guanxi, or friendship network. This can be contrasted with the more individualistic forms of social capital seeking and reputation building evident in Anglophone social media scholarship (Ellison, Gray, Lampe, & Fiore, 2014; Madden & Smith, 2010).

As well as integrating digital media into culturally specific practices of intimacy, digital media become a tool for challenging and transforming these practices. This is particularly evident in younger generations that seek to challenge traditions. For example, Kral (2014) explores how indigenous Australian Ngaanyatjarra youths utilize mobile media to embrace “peer-to-peer” intimacy as opposed to the cross-generational and even ancestral intimacy routed in tjukurrpa (“dreaming”) traditions. While new technologies are still interpreted through these traditions, youths strain patriarchal rules of marriage by looking for love and marriage via social media and outside of kinship spheres. Elders consider this to be the “yinyurrpa way”: the unacceptable way to marry.

It is also worth mentioning that debates around the non-human or post-human quality of intimacy take on different meanings in different cultures. For example, in an excellent study, Arschambault (2016) describes how young male gardeners in Inhambane experience a sense of interpersonal intimacy with their plants. This cannot be understood without first considering the post-colonial, gendered commodification of intimacy in Mozambique. Here, a generation of young men feel incapable of living up to the expensive ideal of the “man-as-provider.” Hence, they turn to a floral love.

A variety of debates emerge in the literature above. Echoing the critiques of public intimacy established by scholars such as Sennett (1977), Berlant (2012), and Illouz (2007), there is a current of digital media scholarship that worries about the way in which social and mobile media encourage a public, performative intimacy that produces ersatz relationships and narcissistic personalities (Rosen, 2007; Turkle, 2011). Often this relates to a critique of the public sphere, and hence public intimacy, as a commodified realm. Echoing scholars who view freedom as essential to modern intimacy (Giddens, 1992), there are also implicit debates on whether new technologies constrain our freedom to connect with whom we truly want to and under our own terms (Light, 2014). This is particularly evident in discussions of presence, where we find ourselves constantly connected to “ambient intimacies” and hence negotiating multiple “presents” (Richardson & Wilken, 2013). Unsurprisingly, there is a renewed call for physically copresent conversation or even solitude (Bennett, 2011; Turkle, 2015).

There are debates about what constitutes an intimate relation. Are ephemeral hook ups a form of intimacy, or is this merely a kind of stranger sociability? Is sex always intimate? And what of non-human relations? Can media interfaces and robots provide intimacy, or is this a classic example of reification? These debates become all the more provocative when we consider transcultural perspectives. Can we call guanxi intimate in rural China in the same way that friends are intimate in urban Australia?

We return to the observation that intimacy is at once ambiguous and also critical to a host of debates. These debates hold ethical positions that are potentially jeopardized by the ambiguous and relative nature of intimacy. Is a ground required on which to build a critique of intimacy as well as a method to understand changes in intimacy fashioned by new technologies? This is the kind of problem that post-structural cultural theory helps to clarify. From the above literature, it is clear that a variety of terms can stand in for intimacy: presence, dialogue, immediacy, listening, nearness, safety, disclosure, sexuality, love, emotionality, affect, memory, privacy, trust, the personal, the interpersonal, care, commitment, family, risk, and economy. Each term is also ambiguous. What of love? Should we distinguish between paternal, maternal, fraternal, sentimental, and even masochistic and sadistic love? When talking about love, we often invoke intimacy, and hence a circular logic. These latticed terms nicely illustrate what Derrida (1976) calls the “trace” of meaning that structures language. The fact that one must trace further and further definitions reveals Derrida’s central point that there is no transcendental logos through which to ground the truth of a term. There is always an excess of meaning inherent to the very temporality of human culture that evades one’s present considerations. Intimacy is part of a linguistic system that defers its meaning. Intimacy is a mutation in meaning, projected on the future.

Many of these conceptions of intimacy are of course historically contingent. I invite you to summon Nietzsche or Foucault. Consider the genealogies of intimacy. Consider for instance that private intimacy is relatively modern, especially where family ties are concerned (McKeon, 2005). Consider the popular notion that intimacy is essential to a project of self-hood. In relationships, we find ballasts to stabilize our identities in a world of risk and contingency (Blatterer, 2014; Giddens, 1991, 1992). Such a notion is inexorably linked to the concerns of modern Western sociology and psychotherapy. Hence, intimacy is an object of what Foucault (1978) would call “regimes of truth.” In as much as these regimes construct the world, in any one period, there is an ontological excess: ways of being intimate that have been forgotten, transformed, or have yet to occur.

These perspectives are politically progressive because they denaturalize hierarchies of cultural value associated with intimacy, such as the importance of romantic love, or filial piety. They in turn afford the legitimation of marginalized forms, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender intimacies. They enable us to see intimacy as something that changes. As a becoming. As a personal and cultural endeavor or exploration. Intimacy’s very contingency makes its future possible. This includes its technological future.

And yet, caution is required. For this, plurality of qualities suggests that intimacy can be highly ambiguous. This raises what I consider to be an essentially metaphysical question. What is intimacy if it lacks historically fixed qualities? The necessity of this question is at once theoretical, methodological, and political. Theoretical because we need a framework to interpret change. Methodological because we need to fit that framework to appropriate modes of encountering the world. Political because the moment we give intimacy some content, we risk doing violence to those who do not define their intimate lives in this or that way. To use existential language, the moment we make intimacy an existant, a static thing, we lose sight of intimacy as existing, as a dynamic process and form, and hence strip it of its alterity and its futurity.

Then, there is the problem of different anthropologies of intimacy and media. Can the Chinese tradition of filial piety be compared with the American nuclear family? Can the Tongan concept of a social network, vā, be compared to the Chinese concept of guanxi? Can Japanese mentsu be compared with Haitian lacou? Marcus and Fischer (1999) have explored anthropological comparisons within the context of our highly globalized society. They chart the way in which such comparisons have become useful as a form of cultural critique that can expose the naturalized politics of Western countries. Here relativism is not seen as a problem, but rather something that can fuel ethically informed critique. Yet, the authors recognize that no culture remains untouched by the economic, technical, and discursive processes of the “world system.” Importantly, they argue that a study of any culture must recognize the mediations that potentially join all cultures, often referred to in terms of a local–global dialectic. Although different in focus, the terms local and global are similar to my terms intimacy and cosmopolitanism in that they are universal forms without content that we can use to understand particulars with content. What underlies these ideas is an understanding that relativism and ambiguity can be accommodated through a study of the very mediating systems that make the recognition of relativism and ambiguity possible. In our context here, we can say that a study of intimacy requires a study of global communication technologies. In a world system that is now dependent on these technologies, can a formal dialectic between intimacy and cosmopolitanism that is politically progressive emerge?

Cosmopolitanism and Intimacy

The dialectic between intimacy and cosmopolitanism is part of what Hegel (1977) would call the current historical “shape” of “spirit”: the metaphysical condition of humanity. Hegel was innovative in arguing that metaphysical ideas could not be separated from concrete historical circumstances. Today, our circumstance is that of a world system in which intimacy always faces cosmopolitanism. One cannot be defined without the other. Each negates the other to become itself. Yet in a Hegelian fashion, one is tantalized with the potential for a sublation in which the dialectic births a new form: cosmopolitan intimacy.

To make this argument, I critically draw on the illuminating yet ultimately ethically dangerous philosophy of Peter Sloterdijk. Sloterdijk (2011) develops a philosophy of existential interiority within the ideal geometry of a sphere. He begins his system with the smallest of spheres, the womb, and its initial expansion as intimate familial, romantic, and communal bubbles. He thus bases his philosophy on a quintessentially formal exploration of intimacy. Within the intrauterine sphere, the medial and formal characteristics of all its post-natal forms are established. These characteristics are commonly referred to as animation and immunization. Spheres are animated by guardian beings such as angels and gods. The primal animator is the mother, who animates the fetus.

Connecting animator and human subject is a media system that is first incarnated as the placenta. This organ provides an intrauterine immune system for the womb-sphere that protects and nourishes the fetus. Immune systems are morphologically dynamic in their ontological and epistemological forms. They are placentas, angels, geniuses, city walls, modern forms of architecture, and air-conditioning systems (Sloterdijk, 2011). I argue that digital media are now essential sphere architectures, particularly where immune systems are concerned.

Sloterdijk constructs immunization as both mediation and security; as both the possibility of a social exchange and of its limits. This is most evident in Sloterdijk’s (2011) romantic conceptualization of the intimate encounter. Here, immune systems succumb to “erotic toxemia” and “affective infections” (pp. 139, 207). Infection overcomes immunity. To be intimate, a sphere’s immunities must fail. Yet these failures are hardly radical. Sloterdijk (2016) rejects the idea that intimate bubbles are capable of expanding to form multicultural spheres. Spheres only maintain their shape when their members share a common ethno-religious animating force. Hence, intimacies are the result of contained infections within a broader homogeneous space. They are the flu shots that eventually strengthen the immune systems of internally similar groups.

Sloterdijk is anti-cosmopolitanism in his suggestion that the admittance of radical difference constitutes an existential threat for spheres. He is highly critical of contemporary global forces. He views the mobility of people, capital, and communication as a foam-like vortex of non-round spheres that lack the capacity to join into coherent collectives. His is a ceaseless dirge for the end of theological and ethnic traits that animate spheres with meaning and identity. He critiques global markets for standardizing the building blocks of spheres, compromising the immune defenses of local spheres, and negating the character of local cultures. He also laments an insipid individualism wrought by self-help psychology and narcissistic forms of personal media, first exemplified by Warhole taping his own voice.

Cultural intimidation and narcissistic individualism come to poison sphere residents with rage and resentment. Terror comes to replace politics, and through chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, terror destroys the very atmospheres that enable sphere-life. In his interviews, Sloterdijk (2016) puts forward some concerning solutions: the dismantling of welfare, the rejuvenation of a romantically prideful German state, and a polarizing, agonistic relationship with Islam (Sloterdijk, 2016). Undergirding these propositions is the desire to retreat into class-based, national, ethnic, and religious spheres.

In conservatively emphasizing the intimate sphere over cosmopolitanism, Sloterdijk challenges us to develop a more progressive conception of how intimacy and cosmopolitanism are related. He also reveals the dark side of intimacy: the way that intimacy does violence to those whom it excludes. Strikingly, most of the work on intimacy and digital media neglects intimacy’s dark side. Instead, intimacy is something sacred to be celebrated. The fact that people are able to sustain intimacy online, especially with distant ties, is seen as a triumph (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2013; Madianou & Miller, 2011). This it may be, but the absent presence of cosmopolitanism and the many ethical issues it raises must be acknowledged.

Another valuable aspect of Sloterdijk’s work is his ontological theory of the subject as becoming within a sphere; that is, as growing within the intimate sphere and then declining and dying within it. He invites us to imagine a seed germinating into a shared enclosure, illustrated brilliantly by Magritte’s La Voix Du Sang: a lithographed autumn tree enclosing a sphere.

I want to thoroughly denature this arc of enclosed being-from-birth and being-toward-death. The womb-sphere is regulated by a host of technologies, and scientific discourses of child development have been shown to be culturally constructed (Lupton, 2013). Children are born into incubation chambers for long stretches of time. Fathers take on primary caring duties. There are same sex parents. Also, death can be significantly prolonged and its experience radically altered by medicine. This has many implications for the caring duties of loved-ones. The intimate enclosure need not be a mitsein with human others, but an enclosure in a virtual reality, a robot relationship, an animal relationship (Haraway’s “companion species”), or even a relationship with oneself: Zarathustra in caves atop black mountains. Beyond the basic existential facts of enclosure, birth and death, the becoming of intimacy is open to a radical transformation of lived-reality in its social, cultural, political, and material elements.

Intimacy is thus open to all the variations mentioned in the previous section. Yet, it also becomes apparent that these diverse qualities all hint at this underlying formalism. Notions of presence, immediacy, nearness, safety, privacy, and vā are all spatial, and thus indicate the ideal spatiality of the sphere. The debate over privacy and intimacy is a debate over how broad and encompassing a sphere should be. The different kinds of face work theorized by East-Asian scholars are various rich methods for protecting the boundaries of a sphere and ensuring its structural integrity.

The formalism of cosmopolitanism is quite different to that of intimacy. If intimacy is an enclosure, cosmopolitanism must conversely be an opening. While intimacy has a mode of becoming that is best expressed as growth and decline, cosmopolitanism has a mode of becoming that is best expressed as an event. Today we find ourselves thrown into a world system of complex social networks. We cannot grow into all of them, yet they still exist around us. When we encounter the non-intimate, we find an aspect of this complex social order revealed to us as an event: an encounter with difference.

Such events have long been conceptualized by sociologists as encounters with strangers (Simmel, 1971). These strangers exist in their own spheres, and from the perspective of any sphere, the cosmopolitan realm of the strange is an excess of social meaning that has yet to be encountered. Yet our relationship to this excess need not be one of innocent curiosity. Rather it may entail a desire for mastery and exploitation, as we see with colonialism, and in neo-liberal discourses of social networking for self-gain (for a critique, see Lambert, 2015a). It may become violent discrimination. Witness online cyber-hate. Witness the anger that broils up toward the other as payback for perceived crimes imputed against status and power. It may provoke a refusal to acknowledge the Other as an Other, but instead a mere spectacle: an image to be swiped left or right on a dating app; an exotic face in a street. As Laclau and Mouffe (1985) argue, when human beings construct a contingent “outside” beyond their social groups, they often do so in an antagonistic way, as they feel essentially challenged by that contingency. The reaction to strangers is also surely influenced by cultural and historical circumstance. A recent migrant is never recognized in the same way as a colonial settler or an indigenous person. These are the problems of recognition and representation that have long been the fleet footed quarry of political philosophers.

It follows that the sublation of intimacy and cosmopolitanism, the opening of a sphere to heterogeneous augmentations, is not guaranteed. I argue that cosmopolitan intimacy requires three key enablers that should be qualitatively researched as well as fostered. Here, I will intentionally shift from a diagnostic to a prescriptive tone. The conceptualization of these enablers must relate to the dialectical structure of intimacy and cosmopolitanism already described. The first enabler: imagine an environment where intimate spheres can open to non-intimate others and augment themselves. What form would this environment take? It would need to have characteristics that would transform the cosmopolitan encounter into something more than an ephemeral event. Rather, the event itself would have to be a beginning. That is, the beginning of a series of repeated encounters. The second enabler is thus repeated sociality. This cannot be passive, but must be a wilful labor or art (Papastergiadis, 2012). The third enabler is thus the type of cosmopolitan consciousness that can compel such an activity.

This consciousness begins with a reformulation of the idea that an immune system must become “infected” by the Other. This allergic yet passive metaphor contradicts the idea of an opening and a wilful labor. Haraway (1991a) has provided a different immune metaphor, in which the body is viewed as engaged in an active, constant splicing with different organisms. This activity should be driven by a kind of virtue. Derrida (2000) expresses it in its singular form as hospitality: a non-allergenic and active welcoming of the other. A host of cosmopolitan thinkers invoke more complex virtues (Appiah, 2007; Hooks, 1992; Sennett, 2003). Unfortunately, there is no space here to perform the same deconstruction of these variations as was given to intimacy above.

Now three fields of media analysis are opened up. First, the nature of technical environments: do they enable both enclosure and opening? Second, the nature of digital socially: are the intimate and non-intimate afforded repeated interactions? Third, the structural conditions on achieving a cosmopolitan consciousness: do digital media enable or constrain the expression, dissemination, and adoption of cosmopolitan virtues?

Methods and Objects

The formalism of intimacy and cosmopolitanism clearly involves the dynamism of social networks. Perhaps a simple form of social network analysis is all that is required? While this may reveal aspects of the architecture of intimate life, it will do little to reveal the ideological dimensions of intimacy and cosmopolitanism. Ethnography is immediately suggestive, as what is required is an inhabitation and tracing of the border zones between intimate spheres and the social cosmos. The work of scholars such as George Marcus, Paul Rabinow, Tom Boellstorff, Daniel Miller, and Larissa Hjorth has influenced the emergence of “digital ethnography” as a well-established, interdisciplinary field. I am particularly interested in Marcus’s (2010) work. He draws important connections between ethnography, art, and design by reconceptualizing participant observation as imaginative collaboration. Ethnographers, artists, and designers are ideal collaborators as they share an “affinity and kinship” for imagining and constructing worlds. Ethnographic fieldwork comes to inform the nature of critical interventions and vice versa. In his discussion of “critical participatory design,” Bowen (2010) emphasizes the power of a critical mind-set in this kind of research. This is sensitive to “alternative social practices, values and technological possibilities that critique the assumed roles and functions for electronic products” (Bowen, 2010, p. 2).

When considering the technical structures of sphere-life, a view toward their design and functionality, as well as their cultures of use, is essential. This involves making their quotidian and ambient functionality visible without having to study them in a state of breakdown. Theorists have begun to consider how to do this with regard to infrastructure and interfaces. Susan Leigh Star (1999) argues that an “ethnography of infrastructure” requires both a habituated experience as well as a sensitivity to how designers “tinker and tailor” with systems. In a sense she reproduces on the technical level the linear yet effective model of media studies clarified by Stuart Hall (2001) in which meaning making is encountered at both the stages of “encoding” and “decoding.” Understanding each stage is made much easier when collaborating with designers whose expertise can elucidate the functionality of media systems.

Imagination, critique, and collaboration. Where to direct these resources? Although this taxonomy is not exhaustive, I believe some essential research objects to be algorithms, sensor infrastructures, interfaces, and robots. In what follows I discuss not only how each can immunize a sphere and foreclose the cosmopolitan event but also how research can critically imagine alternative forms of sphere-life.

Through social and mobile media, many people have connected with a broad and heterogeneous amalgam of social ties. Yet algorithms mediate the connection between the individual or organization and these broader networks. Eli Pariser (2011) famously refers to these algorithms as producing “filter bubbles.” In Sloterdijk’s language, they are technical methods for immunizing intimate spheres. The circuitry of such algorithms can be simplified to a basic feedback between user data as output and curated content as input. The algorithms select content based on what most platforms call “ranking signals.” For example, Facebook’s News Feed uses a sophisticated machine learning algorithm to learn what content users prefer so as to rank this higher in their news feeds. Facebook takes into account thousands of signals, one of the most salient being how close two people are, based on how often they interact. Assumptions about intimacy are recursively performed on the level of code. The aim is to anticipate what users are interested in and to consequently boost advertising “click through” rates.

Facebook’s news feed simultaneously circumscribes a social bubble and curates what we know about others. It thus influences the cosmopolitan encounter as well as the capacity to learn about difference, posing a serious threat to the development of a cosmopolitan consciousness. Researchers are imagining alternative filter bubbles, yet usually within the problematic of journalistic duty toward democratic public spheres (Bozdag & van den Hoven, 2015). There is an opportunity for experimenting with new algorithms that focus on enabling enduring cosmopolitan sociality. The first thing such experiments should acknowledge is that intimacy and cosmopolitanism do not map onto the formal categories that have been used to understand social media, such as the Goffman (1959) dialectic between back and front stage, or normative conceptions of public and private spheres. Indeed, filter bubbles are composed of different contexts with varying degrees of privacy and publicity, what Gillespie (2014) calls “calculated publics.” What is at stake is not so much one’s degree of publicity, but socio-cultural difference. Interventions can inverse the coding of algorithms to focus on the design of ranking signals that identify and prioritize difference. Hence, news feeds and similar online milieu will enable cosmopolitan encounters. Yet these may not be embraced by users. Hence, the discursive regulation of these milieu—their codes of conduct, forms of moderation, and affordances for certain forms of expression—also needs to be attuned to cosmopolitan virtues. Yet just how these regulatory mechanisms come to reflect shared cosmopolitan virtues that are democratically asserted remains a significant research topic in the digital age (Citron, 2014).

Emerge from fields of code and let your senses become attuned to the materiality of digital media. Consider how sensor infrastructures mediate contemporary spheres. Sensors are ubiquitous in our mobile devices and built environments, and increasingly surveil and script our behavior (Andrejevic & Burdon, 2014). They mediate our personal and social movement through space via locative sensors such as GPS. This can produce what Graham (2005) calls “software sorted geographies”: spatial filter bubbles. Humphreys (2007) has explored how location-based social networking apps increase the likelihood of visiting culturally familiar places with friends, producing “homophilic spaces.” The cosmopolitan event is made less likely, as is repeated cosmopolitan sociality and the possibility of learning about diverse cultures within a cosmopolitan social context. Participatory arts are a promising field for researching alternative models. These include art festivals or location-based gaming experiments that suspend or subvert urban spaces and rhythms (McQuire, 2016). Yet as I have elsewhere explored, these events continue to be entangled with technical social sorting and immunization (Lambert, 2015). At Melbourne’s sprawling media art festival, White Night, participants remain tethered to their phones and locative sensors. The media infrastructures at the event—illuminated streets and buildings—subtly usher people to unavoidable spectatorial magnetic zones. They stand arrested and hypnotized, beside their friends. Hence, there remains a significant opportunity for steering event research and planning toward cosmopolitan goals.

Mobile media are also increasingly mediating our relationship with our own bodies through heartrate, galvanic skin response, and other sensors, as well as self-tracking applications usually aimed at monitoring personal health and well-being (Jethani, 2015). Many of these technologies are about increasing self-knowledge, what Lupton (2014) calls the “reflexive monitoring self.” On one hand, this can be read as a form of insular self-concern. And this can translate to a form of closed intimacy. For example, I have explored the phenomenon of relationship tracking applications that seek to clarify the very nature of intimacy, fix problems in relationships, and hence strengthen the boundary of a sphere (Lambert, 2016). Such practices are explicitly about using reflexive self-knowledge for social immunization. Yet self-trackers have also formed an international community of enthusiasts and designers who socialize about their tracking experiments both online and in offline “meetups.” While many of the spokespeople of this community seem to fit within the White Male stereotype, a cursory glance at meetup videos from countries all over the world reveals how broad and heterogeneous this culture is. Given this, and the fact that self-trackers are already engaged in both design and research, the self-tracking community is an excellent laboratory for exploring the possibility of cosmopolitan intimacy in a digital age.

Interfaces also mediate our relationships between spaces and the body. Our interaction with interfaces is a somatic experience that has been theorized phenomenologically (Black, 2014). Recall Bull’s discussion of Walkmans and iPods as producing a kind of sonic intimate enclosure. After decades living under the tyranny of the eye and ear, new technologies that extend other sensors are being developed within a field known as intelligent user interfaces. I am drawn to experiments with haptic interfaces that communicate touch signals such as hugs through digital networks. Because of our cultural association between touch and intimacy, this is often conceptualized as a form of intimate communication (DiSalvo, Gemperle, Forlizzi, & Montgomery, 2003).

Although things like hug interfaces seem dyadic, there are interesting opportunities for conveying touches to multiple people simultaneously, affording the possibility of cosmopolitan events. Kiiroo’s Onyx and Pearl teledildonics interfaces enable sexual contact at a distance, usually with a vibrator (a simulated penis) and masturbator (a simulated vagina). Kiiroo has created a social platform with a Skype style interface that can connect couples and larger groups, allowing the possibility of virtual orgies. Interestingly, the orgy is a key example of “neo-tribal” cosmopolitanism, controversially explored by Michel Maffesoli (1996). Research into intimacy, cosmopolitanism, and interfaces thus needs to be tuned into the phenomenological wavelength, while also grounded in a thorough understanding of material interactions.

Robots are the final technology I wish to touch on. Bill Gates famously stated that by 2025, there will be a robot in every home. Now scientific institutions such as the European Network of Robotic Research are regularly delivering prototype “domestic robots” to be used for a variety of servile home duties, health and aged care, and to act as pets with their own basic emotional simulations. Hiroshi Ishiguro’s androids are known for their intimacy provoking qualities. His Telenoids—designed to appear like androgynous infants—solicit smiles, cuddles, and playfulness from both children and adults. The domestication of these seductive entities, their integration with smart house infrastructures, and their capacity to make home life a cozy alternative to entering the bustle of a multicultural city clearly suggests a turn toward intimacy over cosmopolitanism. Hence, there is an opportunity for the research and design of public robots (and not just automatic drones with their worrying logic of surveillance). Softbank Robotics “Pepper” robot has received a lot of attention in public spaces, beginning with high publicity technology shows, then in commercial spaces where it can greet customers and answer queries. Now there is discussion around such robots coming to replace our smartphones as highly convergent assistants who some people take with them everywhere (Business Insider, 2017). The discourse is one of utility and commerce. Can one imagine a robot that facilitates a cosmopolitan encounter? What are the ethical consequences of robots in the plaza?

While interactions with lifelike physical robots may still seem uncanny, software “bots” have proliferated online, including “social bots” with human characteristics. Examples include David Burden’s non-human second life avatars known as robotars, and Coburn and Marra’s twitter bot Project Realboy. As Gehl and Bakardjieva (2017) discuss, much of the discourse on social bots concerns perceptions of their authenticity and human mimicry. Imitation is an attempt at familiarity, at non-alterity. It is a way for a social bot to invite itself into an intimate sphere, much like a domestic robot. It augments the sphere with apparent sameness, rather than difference. This is rarely considered in cosmopolitan or intimate terms, but rather as a security or authenticity problem. Because some social bots attempt to download user data, security experts view them as a threat to what social networks appropriately call their “immune systems.” A team of researchers and myself at Monash University have begun a project to design a bot that will connect with multicultural participants on Facebook and invite them to express their personal stories on a Facebook page. Here the bot will act as a kind of curator. The sharing of stories within a discursively regulated space is an experiment at fostering an appreciation for difference that will lead to cosmopolitan intimacy.

I believe these various technologies are clearly leaning toward the immunization of intimate spheres, rather than open spheres. Yet as I have shown in each technology, there are either real alternatives or opportunities for producing cosmopolitan intimacy. As a research manifesto, this article advocates a reorientation toward these opportunities that cuts across multiple disciplines.