ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the role of communication technologies in grandparenting, specifically grandfathering, on empirical data collected from men who are grandfathers. The changing spatialities of grandfather-grandchild relations, and relationships across generations, explore as they facilitate gendered care and practices of intimacy. The chapter focuses on familial and intergenerational intimacies, as well as the processes of loving, caring and knowing are being transformed by communication technologies. Grandfathering via ICTs challenges the ideal that proximity is an important feature of family life and highlights alternative ways in which men are engaging in intergenerational care in contemporary societies. The chapter concludes by highlighting how the space opened up by ICT is facilitating new kinds of familial engagement but also become a site in which intergenerational difference and tension may be exacerbated. The use of communication technologies between grandparents and grandchildren has far-reaching implications for considering positive intergenerational relations across multiple generations might be facilitated and harnessed.
