ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role that network connectivity plays as an infrastructure of intimacy. It focuses on a body of 70 essays written by Finnish undergraduate media studies students between 2013 and 2015, describing the sensations evoked by the failure or breakdown of mobile phones, computers and network connections. The chapter shows that the intimate connections and disconnections the essays address nevertheless resonate across generations as 'structures of feeling' in societies where the mobile internet has come to be taken for granted. Connections that are made and maintained through networked media can be equally considered disconnections, as Tero Karppi's and Ben Light's studies of social media render evident. Moments of failure involve the loss of immediate contact as well as a more visceral sense of aborted or deferred intimacy. Intimacy is about gradations of proximity and, as such, is always relational to detachment.
