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Constructing Intimacy: Technology, Family and Gender in East Asia Francesca Bray Received: 26 September 2008 /Accepted: 26 September 2008 / Published online: 29 October 2008 # National Science Council, Taiwan 2008 Keywords Intimacy. Family. Technology After the separation of death one can eventually swallow back one's grief; but the separation of the living is an endless, unappeasable anxiety.1 (Du Fu, ‘Dreaming of Li Bo’) Sometimes there are situations where [my husband and I] don’t say anything face-to-face, but which we communicate through SMS. Like if it’s my birthday, neither of us will mention it face-to-face but later, he’ll SMS me. Sometimes we’ll argue and he’ll apologise to me via SMS. I find this function of mobile phones really useful—what you can’t say face-to-face, you can say via SMS. (32-year old teacher, Shanghai, quoted by Sun Sun Lim) How do expectations of intimacy with family, peers or friends relate to the technologies available to express them, and to the political economy in which they are embedded? Such questions fascinate theorists of the Internet Society, for digital technologies have opened up seemingly infinite new possibilities for creating human bonds where none existed before. Yet the same question can also be profitably applied to almost any human community, present or past, whether their technologies are “advanced”, “traditional” or “mixed”. Intimacy denotes closeness or interdependence , an intertwining of human lives and experiences, replete with the tensions, contradictions and imbalances of power typical of any form of reciprocity. The relations between mother and son, doctor and patient, lovers, and members of a basket-ball team are all intimate in varying ways. Intimacy can usefully be defined East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (2008) 2:151–165 DOI 10.1007/s12280-008-9051-8 1 死別已吞聲 生別常惻惻 Translation Stafford 2000: 125. F. Bray (*) Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: francesca.bray@ed.ac.uk as ‘a form of relatedness entailing material or virtual proximity, implying the sharing of spaces, things, or experiences and resulting in bonding between individuals’ (Santos and Donzelli forthcoming).2 The role of technology in constructing such bonds of perceived proximity and sharing deserves more imaginative attention. The technologies of virtual communication which currently feature so prominently in social theory and STS are certainly one key element in the construction of intimacy in our own society. But we build human closeness from many materials and in many styles. Throughout our history, and still today, communications are just one among many technological domains of sheltering, provisioning, caring, connection and exclusion that we devise to construct the building blocks of intimacy, combining them into complex material and emotional architectures of solidarity and antagonism, tension and comfort, cooperation and control, misery and pleasure. The five articles in this special issue offer a spectrum of insights into how families in East Asia today, including not only sophisticated urbanites but also struggling villagers, use technology to create or enhance networks of intimacy that can help them to survive and thrive in a rapidly changing world. Whether it be the tender thoughts that an urban Chinese couple only feel free to convey in an SMS (Lim); a middle-class Japanese mother’s hesitations over buying a cell-phone for her nineyear old (Matsuda); a Chinese peasant purchasing a washing-machine to protect his wife’s health after giving birth (Wu); an old lady teaching a child a finger-game that has lost its practical meaning (Flitsch); or a website representative helping the owners of a village guest-house to design a page that shows them receiving guests “as family” (Park)—in each of these cases the lens of intimacy reveals how technological choices and practices mediate between the emotional and material micro-dynamics of family life and the broader imperatives of livelihood, political economy or citizenship. When I initially invited the authors to present their papers at an EASTS workshop in 2007, intimacy had not yet occurred to me as the focus; instead I proposed the relations between technology, family and/or gender as a common theme that would address a recognised gap in the STS literature. While family and gender...

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