ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a variety of studies that have deployed online ethnography, qualitative interviews, fieldwork and workshops with regular users of visual communication and mobile media between 2013 and 2016 in South Korea, Spain and Norway. It seeks to bring a feminist analysis to the ways in which textures of intimacy, affective witnessing and structures of 'ugly feelings' play out across online and offline feelings of intimacy. Mobile media can be understood to facilitate an infrastructure around cultural practices of intimacy, whereby the infrastructure is only visible once it is broken. Heartbreak and grief, as experienced in and through mobile media practice, heighten the broken aspects of this infrastructure, especially its social and tacit dimensions. The chapter explores the textures of intimacy through the affective witnessing of the South Korean ferry disaster of 2014, whereby 246 high school children died. It argues that the selfie can be understood as a tool for and of digital intimate publics and affective witnessing.
