Year: 2016
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) such as Skype, Facebook, mobile phones and email have become participants in many families and their doing of family intimacy, to the concern of some commentators.This thesis proposes that 'technological family intimacies' emerge in collective acts of doing family with technology, along with the technologies and human family members themselves.It asks how ICTs authorise and afford the emergence of particular sorts of intimacies, and particular intimate human subjects, and not others, and how these human subjects creatively negotiate this authorising and, in turn, authorise technologies to become in particular ways.In order to ask such questions, the thesis works between and connects two analytic modes which are usually kept separate: a humanistic framing common in sociological accounts of intimacy and family; and a relationistic framing which is primarily found in Science and Technology Studies and anthropology.In order to connect humanist and relationist modes of analysis, the thesis remakes intimacy from a humanistic concept, in which it is a property of relations had by humans, to a relationistic concept in which intimacy is a mode of being human.A second relationistic concept of a family collective, made up of human and technological participants, is introduced.This collective is shown to be working, in stories told in interviews, to design intimacy as promissive: as promising its continuation into the future.Interviews with individuals, couples and families in Melbourne, Australia, and in and around Cambridge and London, UK, form the main empirical material of the thesis.Interview participants are taken as worldly analysts whose analytic work is not different in kind from the work of academic analysts.The stories told by these interview participants are themselves taken as participants in the collective act of the interview, and in the collective work of doing family intimacy with technology and authorising the becoming of entities.The thesis re-tells some participant stories which work through comparison to generate a figure of a 'technology-using intimate self' which counts as an actor, who knows about family intimacy and technology and works with ICTs to promote the emergence of particular sorts of intimacies.Other stories elicit the emergence of a subject-object hybrid, Only one name goes onto a PhD thesis, but many people contribute to it.My interview participants gave generously of their time and their stories, without which there would be no thesis.My supervisor, Helen Verran, has contributed to every part of this thesis, and I am extremely thankful for her generosity, wisdom, and loyalty to her students in difficult institutional times.
Author: Alison Marlin
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2542870462