Abstract
Significant restrictions on movement outside the home due to the global COVID-19 pandemic have intensified the importance of everyday digital technologies for communicating remotely with intimate others. In this article, we draw on findings from a home-based video ethnography project in Sydney to identify the ways that digital devices and software served to support and enhance intimacy and sociality in this period of crisis and isolation. Digital communication technologies had an increased presence in people’s domestic lives during lockdown. For many people, video calling software had become especially important, allowing them to achieve greater closeness and connection with their friends and family in enacting both everyday routines and special events. These findings surface the digital and non-digital materialities of sociality and intimacy, and the capacities opened by people’s improvisation with the affordances of home-based communication technologies at a time of extended physical isolation.
Highlights
The unfolding crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic has drastically reshaped the day-to-day lives of many people around the world, including in Australia
We focused on the affordances of apps and platforms in and for the unfolding of sociality and intimacy at a distance
They reported some changes in device use, including the style and frequency of their communications with family and friends using digital devices and software
Summary
The unfolding crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic has drastically reshaped the day-to-day lives of many people around the world, including in Australia. A growing body of research adopts a sociomaterial perspective to examine how people come together with material objects to configure dynamic human-nonhuman assemblages that enact intimacy and sociality. Taken-for-granted practices that bring humans and things together to generate forces, relational connections and agencies. These approaches emphasise that social relationships are dynamically configured with and through material objects. They focus on the everyday, affective and relational nature of enactments of materialities of intimacy and sociality. Sociomaterial research has found that paying close attention to the routine enactments of digital technologies can surface the complexities of these practices. In terms of family relationships, several researchers have shown that family members separated by long distances have found benefits in using digital media such as Skype and messaging apps (Longhurst, 2016; Madianou, 2016) for enacting transnational and intergenerational ‘ambient co-presence’ (Madianou, 2016)
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