ABSTRACT
The role of gender is particularly prevalent within the rise of affective technologies such as mobile media and Web 2.0 (Lasén, 2004). This is undoubtedly linked to mobile media’s genealogy as a domestic technology whereby gendered modes of material and immaterial forms of labor are reenacted (Rakow, 1992; Rakow and Navarro, 1993 Wajcman et al., 2009). For Leopoldina Fortunati, the increasing proclivity of mobile media to exploit social labor is inevitably informed by gendered roles of intimacy that, in turn, reflect a sense of belonging and home (Wajcman and Haddon, 2005). Mobile media demonstrates that while domestic technologies can physically leave the home, they are still symbolic of sociocultural notions of what constitutes a household
economy and the attendant forms of intimacy. Far from intimacy being “mobile,” and thus impervious to place, it is the repository of the mobile that further amplifies localized practices of what it means to be intimate (Hjorth, 2005a). Thus, to explore intimacy, we need to consider the role of place as informing our “communities of feelings” (Hochschild, 2003) and “feeling rules” (Hochschild, 1983) associated with “affective technologies” (Lasén, 2004).
