2006, Globalizing Intimacy-The Role of Information and Communication Technologies in Maintaining and Creating Relationships

Globalizing Intimacy: The Role of Information and Communication Technologies in Maintaining and Creating Relationships Author(s): Gill Valentine
Source: Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 1/2, The Global & the Intimate (Spring Summer, 2006), pp. 365-393 Published by: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40004765 . Accessed: 11/11/2013 01:12
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THE GLOBALIZING INTIMACY: ROLE OFINFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION INMAINTAINING TECHNOLOGIES AND CREATING RELATIONSHIPS
GILL VALENTINE INTIMACY AND GLOBALIZATION
Intimacy is a specific sort of knowing, loving, and caring for a person (Jamieson1989, 1). Growing up implicitly involves intimacy in terms of close association with one or more adults. Beyond our parents, significant others include all those who have a particular role in, and commitment to, shaping of the self (Berger and Luckmann 1966). Despite the importance of intimate relationshipsin people's lives- and as the building blocks of families, communities, and stable society - it is only relatively recently that intimacy and emotions have become topics of social science research (Jamieson1989). Most disciplines have paid more attention to the study of public economic and political organization than they have to informal, private social relations (Roseneil and Budgeon 2004). Indeed some commentators suggest that the growing interest in emotions, psychoanalysis, and personal growth/development of the self, as well as in childhood and intergenerational relations, marks the beginning of a "privateturn"within the social sciences (Bailey 2000). Both Giddens (1991) and Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1995) claim that profound changes are occurring in the sphere of intimacy in the context of contemporary processes of individualization, detraditionalization, and increased self-reflexivity. In the transformationfrom industrial society to new modernity, traditional ideas and expectations about social relations are being reworked. The preordained path of school, paid work, courtship, marriage, and parenthood is now less clearly marked. Rather there has been a weakening of class ties, a decline in reliance on authorities such as the church, and a decoupling of some of the social behaviors and attitudes that used to be attached to marriage and family life (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995). Such that Beck-
Studies 34: 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer [WSQ: Women's Quarterly 2006)] 2006by Gill Valentine. All rights reserved.
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GLOBALIZING INTIMACY
Gernsheim(2002, 22) claims that "individualself fulfilment and achievement is the most powerful current in modern society." In this context Giddens (1992) argues that traditional forms of close personal relationships encumbered by kin and community obligations are being replaced by the pursuit of "purerelationships."These are relationships that are entered into for their own sake in the pursuit of happiness, and are sustainedonly as long as they are fulfilling. As such they are based on voluntary commitment, mutual trust, equality, and reflexivity. Individuals now have to work more self-consciously on who they are and what kind of relationship they want. Giddenslinks the emergence of pure relationships to the development of "plastic sexuality"- in which sex has been decoupled from reproduction. Relationships (sexual and family) are now less about rules and rituals and more about choice and risk, with the consequence that love and intimacy are both more important than ever but harder to achieve and maintain (Holland et al. 2003). For example, the greater importance placed on having a "good" marriage and the pursuit of individual pleasure, has produced higher divorce rates as individuals feel less obliged (e.g., by the church, marriage vows, community tradition, etc.) to stay in unsatisfactoryrelationships. Relationships between parents and children are also argued to be changing. In particular, the traditional social distance between parents and their offspring is alleged to be breaking down as adults sacrifice their traditional authority for closer, more intimate relationships with their children (Jamiesonand Toynbee 1990;Valentine 1997b). In an individualized culture, the balance of obligations has shifted so that the responsibilityis no longer on the child to be a dutiful son or daughter but on the parent(s) to optimize their child's opportunity to fulfill their potential mainly by providing appropriate material and social opportunities (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995). Increasingly, it is argued that it is not just family and sexual relationships alone but an increasing range of personal relationships (e.g., noncoresidential partnerships, friendships, communities, etc.) that provide intimacy, care, and companionship in an individualizing world (Budgeon and Roseneil 2004). Here too, contemporary friendship is argued to be product of choice - based on pleasure and trust- rather than the product of the coincidence of location which characterized traditional neighborhood community. In particular, Bell and Binnie (2000) argue that globalization is argued to be weakening the nation-state and
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opening up new spaces for groups to enact new types of politics and communities that might be considered a form of intimacy. Surprisingly, "although globalization is well recognized and much discussed,very few studies ever talk about the connections of this process to intimate life" (Plummer 2001). Intimacy is usually assumedto require physical proximity. The word closeis a synonym for intimate, and literal closeness is often assumedto be essential for familiarityand commitment. Yet globalization is a complex process of movement and flows of people- as well as goods, services, capital, technologies, ideologies, and so on (Appadurai 1996). As a result, globalization might superficially be presumed to undermineor threaten intimacy as more and more partnersand familiesno longer live their daily lives in the same place. Yet distancedoes not necessarilybring intimacy to an end; growing numbersof people "live apart together" (Holmes 2004). These include, for example, commuter couples where a partner (usually the man, in a heterosexual relationship) works away from home during the week, often staying in temporary or institutional accommodation (see Chandler 1991;McKee and Mauthner 2000), returningto the family home at weekends; dual-careercouples who live apart, maintainingindividual residencesin separatelocations, usually as a response to work (Heath 1999; Levin 2004); and diasporic families, whose membersmay be scattered across the globe. The Internetin particular has been credited with facilitating the possibility of maintainingintimate relationshipsover distance, and with creating a new global space for exploring and developing different intimacies. Early public discourses about the Internet assumedthat because it is a disembodied form of communication, it would be impersonal and facilitate deceit, so reducing trust and accountability in online social relations (e.g., in a study by Henderson and Gilding 2004). At the same time, there were fears that use of the Internet would be addictive, creating socially isolated loners disconnected from their surroundings. McCellan (1994, 10) for example predicted that "on-line culture creates mouse potatoes, people who hide from real life and spend their whole life goofing off in cyberspace." However, numerous studies have demonstrated that these fears have been overstated (e.g., Holloway and Valentine 2003). Indeed, some research suggests that online exchanges are characterized by higher levels of self-disclosure or hyperpersonal communication. The asynchronous nature of online communication allows users to have time to reflect on exactly what they want to say
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before sending an e-mail. Henderson and Gilding (2004) claim that online relationships involve active trust based on performance and active negotiation rather than reputation or established routines and so are closer to Gidden's (1991) notion of a "purerelationship"than offline relationships. Likewise, Hardey (2002, 574) argues that "the consequent vision of a highly discursive, disembodied late modern intimacy based on talk rather than passion, negotiation rather than commitment, and the advancement of the self rather than the development of the couple suggests that the internet is uniquely placed to facilitate such relationships." In this essay, I therefore explore intimacy and globalization in the context of the Internet. I begin by considering how the Internet is used within familial relationshipsand the dynamicsof intimacy (knowing, loving, caring). I then go on to consider the Internet as a space in which new practices of intimacy are emerging. Here I focus on the way that lesbian and gay men are using the Internetto create sexual relationshipsand communities. Finally, in the conclusion I consider some of the similarities,and potential tensions, between the use of information communication technologies (ICT) for "doingfamily"and "doingsexual intimacy." In doing so I draw on empirical material collected in two different studies in the United Kingdom, both funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. The first was a two-year study of ICT. It involved indepth interviews with forty parents and their children (interviewed separately) about their use of computers and the Internet and interviews with six teachers about the relationship between school use of ICT and children's home-based use of the technology. The second study, with "vulnerable" young people, involved forty-one in-depth interviews with young people recruited through youth and support groups (online and offline) in the United Kingdom. Here, lesbians and gay men were asked about their use of the Internet in terms of developing their sexual identities, communities, and relationships. All the interview material was taped and transcribedusing conventional social science techniques.
APART THOUGH TOGETHER: CONSTITUTING AND FAMILIAL MAINTAINING RELATIONSHIPS ONLINE

There is growing acknowledgment that traditional patterns for delivering love and care may be changing. Families in contemporary Western societies- though living together- are spending more time apart (Gillis 1996). The rise in dual careers and the growth in the number of people
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working in the service industries necessitating weekend or shift work means that family time in many households is being squeezed. This is exacerbated by the growing institutionalization of childhood (Adler and Adler 1994;Katz 1994;Aitken, 2001; Valentine 2004)- in which middleclass children in particular- are spending more time in day care, afterschool clubs, or out-of-school educational pursuits (such as football training and music lessons). This is at least in part a product of an individualized culture in which parents are expected to make considerable material and personal sacrifices to provide their children with the education, sport, and social activities necessary to make the best start in life (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995). For middle-class adults, in particular, whose lives are strongly governed by the dominant time economy, clock time is regarded as a resource to be budgeted, allocated, and controlled (Adam 1995). As such, children's leisure time is increasingly understood as something that should be spent productively in various institutional activities rather than "wasted" on free play in public settings. In this context many contemporary families in the United Kingdom are living together but spending their time apart engaged in different asynchronous "productive"activities. Alongside this contemporary trend of families not spending time together is a concern about the decline in the traditionalnuclear family in contemporaryWestern societies (Popenoe 1988). Nearly one in two U.S. children and one in three U.K. children will witness the breakupof their birth family during their childhood (Jensen1994). In these situations the majority of childrenremainliving with their mothers. However, this does not necessarilysignal the death of the family. Most adultscontinue to live in partnerships,and to aspire to these forms of relationships (Silva and Smart 1999). Rather, what is changing is the way that people are "doing" family (Morgan 1999). Among the many nontraditional forms of living arrangementsthat are emerging include part-time relationshipsand relationships that are maintained between different homes, sometimes over large geographicaldistances.Levin (2004)has used the phrase"living apart together" to describe U.K. families separatedby work in this way. However, here I extend the use of this term to embrace the ultimate example of - transnational familiesseparatedby work commitments families. For both families living together apart and those living apart together, the Internet provides a new space for maintaining intimacy.
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LIVING TOGETHER APART

The Internet expands the opportunities for daily meaningful contact between family members locked in different time-space routines at work, school, traveling, and so on. In this sense online exchanges and daily Internet use are adding a new dimension, rearticulating practices of everyday life and lived spaces (Franklin2001). For example, the Internet enables partners in sexual relationships to stay in touch when they are apart, to exchange news or information about their activities, to make plans or organize their lives, and even to share fantasies or initiate a sexual encounter. Likewise, both parents and children use e-mail to have informal contact, to check up on one another, and sometimes to seek advice or emotional support when they are apart during the working/school day. As Sebastianexplains below, whereas there is an expectation that if you telephone someone you must have a reason for making the call, e-mail is a more casual way of keeping in touch. For example, it does not necessarily interrupt the other person in the way that a telephone call might and does not always require a response, yet represents a flow of care or emotion between family members when they are apart. Mrs. Bishop: Oh, and I do er, e-mail the childrenat school sometimes- when I get a message from Simon saying "oh I'm bored doing geography lesson" and er, so on and I e-mail back "get on with your work" or, you know, "why are you e-mailing." Sebastian: I've e-mailed Mum from school, and school from here, and Mum uses it a lot as well. . . . And it's more, it's not as hard- you know - you don't really need a reason to do it, whereas if you 'phone up you have to have a conversation really. ... Instead of just saying how things are going, so it's made it quite a bit easier to get in contact with each other. When the family are under the same roof, ICT can also bring families together both online and offline. Gillis (1996) suggests that shared activities such as family meals and Sunday drives first became important for instantiating the family during the nineteenth century. Through such activities, households not only came together as family but also began to imagine themselves as a family. In contemporary times the television set
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(Spiegel 1992) and now ICT have become the glue that binds some families together. In many homes parents actively locate the computer in a shared space such as the living room or kitchen to promote family computing activities and a sense of togetherness if one member of the household is using the Internet alone (e.g., for work). Tim describes below how he surfs the Internet together with his father while his mother watches. In this way being together in the same room sharing the experience of using the Internet is just as constitutive of the family for Tim's mother as actually surfing the Web with her husband and son. Indeed, ICT is such a part of this family's life that they even take the technology on holiday with them. Tim: We're planning to take the computer down there to the coast in the boot [the trunk of the car]. It just about fits in the caravan. . . . She'll [his mother] watch us ... she'll watch us but she won't go on it [the Internet] . . . she'll be in here watching me dad go on the Internet. She doesn't know what's going off like but she'll watch. And you know me dad will try and bring things up for her. Open communication is important in developing and maintaining intimacy. Using ICT together in the ways described above can foster intergenerational communication and consequently change the way parents and their children relate to each other. In the example below, Mr. Akram explains how when he sacrificed his parental authority by asking his son for technical assistance, it produced a change in the nature of their father/son relationship. He can no longer adopt an authoritarian role with his son in the same way that he sees other fathers issue commands to their children, because his son might refuse to give him the technical support upon which he depends. Instead, negotiating help using ICT has provided an opportunity for Mr. Akram to develop a positive, if subtly different, relationship with his son, one that is predicated on mutual respect and reciprocity, rather than on an adultist assumption that as the father he is automatically more knowledgeable and in control (Holloway and Valentine 2001): Mr. Akram: You're maintaining a good relationship between yourselves- it may not be a father-and-son relationship, but it
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may be a friend-to-friend relationship, in order for, to get that work done. . . . But I don't mind being taught by somebody younger thanme becauseI mean, I respecthim all the more for it. Nevertheless, thoughmany childrendo have greater technicalcompetence than their parents in some families, parents' and children's competencies are in different fields, allowing for the possibility of knowledge-sharing that has echoes of Papert's (1997) recommendationsfor a positive family learningculture. Equally, some childrenhave helped to develop their parents' skills to the degree that their parentshave now become able to offer help in return(Holloway and Valentine2001). Mr. Gould: I mean David was teaching me how to cut and paste stuff off the Internet. I show him how to turn a table into a graph, different kinds of graphs. Lucy Thomas: I help Dad with like his quotes. He'll say like, you know, "how do I get [this in the center]"- 'cos he is still a bit like funny with how do you get this in the center or this, you know, "I want this down a bit" and that's what I help him with mainly. [She continues later.] But he's got better now so I don't have to show him so much, and sometimes it like, it's quite bad when he ... has to show me stuff, and that feels like, you know, I've been doing this longer than you! So he's picked up a lot of stuff and he's quite good now. As these examples demonstrate, ICT plays a positive role in many families, allowing members to communicate their love, concern, or care for each other when they are apart. At the same time the technology can also facilitate changes in the dynamics of families' intimate relationships when they are under the same roof by literally bringing the family together around the screen, and by altering the intergenerational dynamics in terms of who has the ability to provide support or take responsibilityfor another. However, ICT does not always emerge as a positive factor in family relationship. Partners struggling with conflict in their relationshipsmay seek the comfort or understandingthat they believe is missing from their offline relationship through online intimacy. Women, in particular,
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apparentlyregard the Internet as liberating, allowing them more opportunities in relative safety to experiment and take sexual risks beyond their expected gender role (Cooper et al. 2000). Excessive amountsof time spent online by an individualfamily member can also be a cause of tension (Cooper et al. 2000; and Shaw 1997; Leiblum1998;Cooper 1998), particularlywhen an individualgives precedence to spendingtime online over spendingtime with other family members (Steward 2000). Women traditionallyhave made time for family and in "doing"family. In contrast, men's time is more often their own, and ratherthan spendingtime on producingand sustainingthe family they tend to spend time with family members (Leccardi 1996). Women also tend to make up the greatest percentage of non-ICT users across all age groups. Not surprisingly,therefore, it is mothers who most often regardICT as an interruptionto family life (Holloway and Valentine2003). Anecdotal evidence from Relate (a U.K. relationship-counselingservice) suggests that the Internet is increasingly emerging as a cause of domestic tension not only because of the way it absorbsindividuals'time but also because it is a tool that can facilitate infidelity by one partner (usually the man), while also enabling children to potentially access unsuitablematerial or to communicatewith strangersonline (Holloway and Valentine2003). Louise: My mum's always complaining about it, but I'm not bothered, 'cos my dad's sometimes on it [the computer] for like all day or something and she'll get mardy [annoyed] because he doesn't talk to her.
LIVING APART TOGETHER

The dissolution of marriage disrupts social networks and those of any children. The previous academic literature has identified a significant atrophy rate of relationships between children and noncustodial fathers following divorce (Fustenberg and Cherlin 1991). Often the initial patterns of modest contact between fathers and their children are followed by a sharp decline in involvement over time as their lives become both socially and physically distanced. This is often exacerbated if the birth parents have a discordant relationship following the breakup of their marriage or when families are reconstituted and social parents enter into the equation (Valentine 1997a). When families split up, children also commonly lose touch with
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their grandparents on the noncustodial side. More generally, even in families that stay together many grandparents have little face-to-face contact their grandchildrenbecause of contemporary patterns of mobility. The rapid growth in the number of young people going to university and taking "gap years" between school and university, to travel, or between leaving university and starting work has further stretched many families across the United Kingdom and around the globe- albeit on a relatively temporary basis. Despite physical separation,however, most people retain a profound emotional commitment to their families. In this gap ICT provides a space for online intimacy that at least partially compensates for the limits of intimacy offline and provides a way of binding together dislocated family members. ICT allow family members to transmit information between them so that people know where they are and what they have been doing. Beyond this, online means of communication such as e-mail, instant messaging, and chat rooms also enable people to extend themselves in space and time by engaging directly with others who are located at varying distances away. While other means of communication such as the telephone and postal service offer similar opportunities, e-mail has the advantageof being cheaper to use than the telephone and is a quicker and more informal means of communication than writing a letter. It also potentially allows a more "private"means of contact between individual family members than telephoning from a sharedroom in the family home or receiving a letter that other family members may intercept or ask to read. In this way specific family members (e.g., a nephew and an aunt, a son and father) can stay in touch or get to know each other through oneto-one or one-to-many communication (e.g., an e-mail list) without this needing to be mediated by another family member, such as a parent. Louise: I e-mail my dad a lot 'cos he's in Kettering at the moment but he's just moved house, he normally lives in Warwickshire so I haven't got his new phone number yet. Interviewer: But you do know his ... Louise: His e-mail address. Interviewer: So that's at work? Louise: Yeah. But he really likes getting e-mails at work, he thinks it's really funny.
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Head Teacher: I see a lot of them [the pupils] using e-mail to correspond with er, older brothers and sisters at university or uncles and aunts in different parts of the world . . . and I think that's, that's absolutely brilliant. You know, 'cos, if you're talking about shrinking the globe and really, you know, the fact that somebody can have regular e-mail contact with their um, aunt in Canada, which I know happens with one child. I think that'sjust absolutely superb. Many people also use ICT to find creative ways of indirectly maintaining their obligations to each other and performing daily caring functions. For example, some families use supermarketWeb sites to shop for elderly relatives living in other parts of the country; or to send birthday or Christmas gifts. Likewise, online banking enables parents to manage the financial affairs for, or top up the accounts of, their children when they are away traveling. However, the ultimate example of maintaining familial ties in the face of geographical distance is provided by transnational families.
TRANSNATIONAL FAMILIES
Transnational families can be defined as families who are physically divided between different nation-states but maintain close contact. These circumstances are commonly the result of family members' migrating internationally in search of work. For example, within the Caribbean there is a history of what was called child shifting, in which grandmotherswould take over the care of their grandchildren to allow their daughters to work overseas (Levitt 2001). Hochschild (2000) has coined the term carechainto describe the situation in which (usually) female migrant workers move from poorer countries to provide domestic services- often child care- for individuals and families in richer countries, leaving their own children behind. Indeed, Pratt (1997) has argued that Canadiansvalue Filipina nannies because of their dedication to their own families, without recognizing the irony of the way these families are fragmented by the women's employment. However, while parents who have migrated for work may no longer be in the same space as their children, ICT offers alternative contexts for care. Like U.K. families who live together but spend most of their time apart, transnational families' everyday practices and social
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relations can also be negotiated by e-mail- albeit in a more fundamental way. In particular, e-mail allows absent parents to provide emotional care for children from whom they are separated. Both parent and child can also build up a mutual knowledge about each other's everyday life such that the child might still be expected to use online communication to negotiate his or her autonomy/independence by asking permission from his or her parent to do particular things, while the parent can use technology to discipline the child. Although there are limits to the extent to which ICT can act as a substitute for the everyday physical intimacy of kisses and hugs, and to which it can overcome the emotional pain and emptiness of missing someone who is physically absent. For those migrants who settle permanently overseas with their children or who subsequently establish their own families, the Internet can be an important means for teaching second and third generations about the family's history and the wider kinship network and culture of which they are a part. In this sense ICT sustains "family"narratives and a sense of affinity with, and belonging to, the "home country." Adams and Ghose (2003, 416) describe the numerous interlinked Web sites used by the Indian diaspora as a "variegated space of international and multicultural communication we call bridgespace." They suggest that ICT allows "offshore"families to keep in touch with Indiannews and culture by seeking information about or purchasing online commodities such as traditional clothing, food, books, music, and DVDs. The Internet also enables family members to care for or maintain obligations toward each other at a distance, by for example, facilitating international money transfers or gift delivery, as well as supporting visits through information sites about visa, passport services, and travel agents. As Adams and Ghose's (2003) "bridgespace"metaphor implies, the Internet facilitates movement in both directions; they cite the example of matrimonial services that are used by Indian families to find overseas partners for their offspring. ICT has also become a new way for second- and third-generation migrants- who may grow up between two cultures and feel that they lack cultural fluency in both- to express or cultivate their ethnicity. Kyriakopolous(2002), for example, argues that whereas first-generation immigrants do not have to establish that they are Greek, they just are, second-generation Greeks have to prove their Greeknessby demonstrating and promoting this identity. In Canada young people download
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Greek pop songs and play them to friends. Web sites about Greek folk dancing and about a Greek version of backgammon are also popular vehicles for Greeks all over the world to develop and maintain stronger ties with the "homeland" (Panagakos 2003). Knowledge about wider kinship networks and familial history acquired on the Internet can also be used to bolster individuals' standing in their local community. Graham and Khosravi (2002) suggest that the Internet provides a space where two generations of Iranian emigrants can meet. They observe that online exchanges between Iraniansoften take place in English because the written Persian of second-generation Iranians is often not fluent enough for them to engage in an open dialogue with the first generation. The first generation regard online communication as a good opportunity to bridge the gap between themselves and their children by showcasing their Iraniancultural heritage. While they often write about the past and their longing to return home, the second generation tend to write about their lives and identities in the past, present, and future. In this way, the Internet provides a space where what it means to be Iranian can be reworked between the generations of the same family. In this section, I have demonstrated the potential value of the Internet as a new form of family practice that maintains and supports the development of intimacy between family members living or spending large amounts of time apart. The Internet does this by facilitating information and knowledge to be exchanged between family members online; enabling obligations to care for or support each other to be fulfilled over long distances; and allowing emotion, trust, and respect to ' flow among the family regardless of individuals geographical locations. At the same time, ICT is not just a way of doing family online; rather, it can bring families together offline and enable individual members to (re)negotiate their relationships with each other (in positive and negative ways); and familial knowledge acquired online can also be used to advance individuals' status in their offline communities. However, as I have outlined above, there are limits to this intimacy too. While ICT enables families who live apart to "keepin touch," it can never be a substitute for physical touch and the love and reassurance a hug or cuddle can provide. Moreover, ICT is sometimes used by individual family members- particularly men- not to facilitate the "doing of family" but rather as a time and space away from the family to pursue work, interests, or sexual liaisons.
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Cultures of intimacy and care are almost entirely considered in the academic literature as taking place under auspices of family (understood as a monogamous heteronormative unit) and are discussed in terms of generational narratives (Berlant and Warner 2000; Roseneil and Budgeon 2004), but intimacy and care increasingly take place beyond the family, through, for example, networks of friends and lovers dubbed by some commentators "families of choice" (Weston 1991; Weeks et al. 2001). Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (1998, 558), for instance, argue that "[mjaking a queer world has required the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation." In particular, the evidence of lesbian and gay scholars is that there is often a blurring of boundaries between friendships and sexual relationships- friends become lovers, lovers become friends, and people have multiple sexual partners of varying degrees of commitment (Bech 1992). In the following section I consider the role of the Internet in creating and facilitating other forms of intimacy.
NEW CREATING INTIMACIES

The Internet is not just a tool for maintaining and sustaining existing familial relationships;it can also facilitate the creation of new intimacies. - it is accessible, providing millions In this respect it has three advantages of Web sites and communication channels that are available twenty- four hours a day; it is relatively affordable; and it provides opportunities to communicate with others anonymously(Cooper et al. 2000). In particular, the Internet provides a space for those traditionally excluded from public space. Lesbian and gay people have been at the forefront of using ICT to forge sexual relationships and communities (Gauntlett 1999). The ten most popular chat rooms on the largest U.S. subscriber service, America Online (AOL), are all sexual, and three of them are gay. The Internet is important for many people who are unsure of, or struggling with, their sexuality because it enables them a space to search for informationabout lesbian and gay communities/lifestyles and to make contact with individualsor community groups for support. Although, as Hilary explains below, very sexually explicit sites can be intimidatingfor young people who arejust beginning to explore their sexuality.
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Jerry: I think the Internet is invaluable actually . . . most things like that seem to, seem to have a large presence on the Web. 'Cos I say you can, it doesn't matter how you treat it day to day, in your work and your school, you can get home and just sit down and talk to someone who might be eighty miles away but they understand . . . the sort of chat room I talked about which was good because it was, monitored by people employed by ... the Internet provider . . . you could go on there and say "oh I'm feeling a bit confused" and someone would like take you aside and talk to you about it. Sandra: I've just signed up with a lesbian support group [name removed]. They've just put me in contact with a lass as a pen pal. They also gave me some information about coming out and like a fact sheet as well, you know what it is about being gay. Hilary: E-mail lists . . . for like pen-pal-type things. I don't use Internet chat rooms because really whatever they say is the subject it's always sex so- and it's always quite scary so I don't use those really. ... I get things like the Advocate update lists sent to me e-mail that kind of thing so I know what's going onthat's about it. ... It's friendship. It's just so I know you know sort of there's someone else out there. In the past this process of self recognition - there are others out there like me- would have relied on individuals seeking out lesbian and gay venues. The emergence of the Internet is therefore particularly important for LGB (lesbian, gay, and bisexual) people who may be socially or geographically isolated from offline lesbian and gay communities (Woodland 1995;Haag and Chang 1997), or young people who are age barred or fearful of going to an offline venue. In other words the Internet offers a space for emotional expression and for experimenting with sexual identity, fostering a sense of self-identity that may not be available elsewhere, and making friends and intimate relationships, while providing a refuge from the confines, and in some cases hostile climate, of offline everyday heterosexuality. As such the Internet, or cyberspace, is not just a place where lesbians and gay men "gather" online; it is also a space that can be transformativeof identities. For Correll (1995) the Internet creates online lesbian communities
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INTIMACY GLOBALIZING
that she characterizes as being defined not by locale but by a high degree of personal intimacy, moral cohesion, and social interaction. Indeed, Adams and Ghose (2003) suggest that because ICT appear to collapse space and time they make communities feel more close knit. Such forms of online community are particularly important in societies where homosexuality is forbidden,because the Internet, as a medium without physical borders, offers more freedom (Graham and Khosravi 2002). For example, Homan is a transnational support group formed by Iranian lesbian and gay men that exists only in cyberspace (see www.homanla.org) and is designed for individuals struggling with their sexuality or who want to explore their sexuality within the boundariesof Iraniansociety (Grahamand Khosravi 2002). It includes sexually explicit information in Persian about HIV/ AIDS as well as links to more than thirty other sites for Iranianlesbians and gay men, though it has attracted censorship from the Iranian government, which has also closed down Internet cafes frequented by lesbians and gay men, as well as hate mail from individuals and organizations (Graham and Khosravi 2002).While some critics have suggested that the Internet (and other processesof globalization) has accelerated the Americanization and homogenization of lesbian and gay movements/cultures around the world (Altman 1996), researchshows that this assumptionis too simplistic (Binnie 2004). Writing aboutTaiwan, Tan(2001)demonstratesthat while selected elements of Anglo-American gay culture and politics have been adopted by the Taiwanese Tongzhi, these are fused with local/national traditions and practices to create a hybrid sexual culture/politics. Indeed,while the Internetis often hailed as the locus of global lesbian and gay community, many people use it to find local support.However, as the quotes below imply, while some young lesbian and gay people are comfortable being out in the public space of an online chat room or Web site, offline family relations can sometimes constrain their ability to realize these "virtual"relationships in offline space. In particular, while the Internet offers access to global sociosexual relations, it has to be accessed from technology that may be located in offline spaces such as family homes and workplaces where users have little privacy or may be subject to surveillance. Jerry: When I was like coming out I, there was like this sort of gay chat room. It wasn't dirty or anything. But . . . there were a
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lot of people like talking about sort of gay issues and things. It was like a [name of company deleted] Internet thing. It was run by them, sort of quite proactively. Yeah, and they like discussed scenes in different towns. They had sort of social meets and everything. That was really good thinking about it. They went marching for Pride with their own banner and stuff. And I never actually sort of physically met any of them. Though I did intend to actually, my mum stopped me when she found out. "Oh yeah, I'm just going to Birmingham to meet a load of gay people I've never met, Mum." "No you're not." "All right, sorry." ... I can see her point of view from that one I guess. But yeah that, I can see how that certainly was bringing a lot of people who were otherwise were locked in their bedrooms like with no one to talk to but. Adrian: I've got a Yahoo Messenger which keeps a list of my friends 'cos a lot of my friends around here have got the Internet so sometimes I chat to them which makes it a lot easier for me to instead of using the phone so I mean there's a guy who's a mutual friend of ours in [name of place removed] and he's got the Internet and we sometimes chat and arrange to go out on a Fridaynight or a Saturdaynight. Perhaps more significant, the Internet has facilitated the development and expansion of new ways for people to establish intimate relationships. Ways of meeting online include through newsgroups (public message boards);bulletin board systems (BBS) that can offer newsgroup functions, e-mail, and live chat; electronic-mail discussion lists (these involve subscribersrather than being a completely open public forum); chat rooms (these are live real-time interactions, whereas newsgroups and e-mail communication is usually asynchronous)(Wakeford 2000).
SEARCHING MATES? FOR SOUL

Internet dating sites are credited as being a better place to meet possible partnersthan offline alternatives because the former usually allow more lengthy advertisements with supplementaryinformation than is possible in newspaper dating advertisements, which are limited by space constraints. As such rather than merely listing an inventory of personal
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attributes, online dating profiles are less formulaic, creating a reflexively organized story about the advertiser- which reflects not only a selfdefinition of how they see themselves in the present but also their life choices and who they have the potential to become (Burke 2000). This provides more information with which participants can evaluate each other and try to establish their trustworthiness without the possible embarrassment attached to meeting face-to-face, before the friendship/relationship is taken offline (Hardey 2002, 2004). Indeed, the Internet provides a space for a huge range of specialist sites dedicated, for example, to particular sexual practices, minority ethnic groups, or vegetarians, which means that individuals have more opportunity to meet the "type" of person they are looking for online than they would through more generic newspaper dating columns or chance meetings in everyday life (Hardey 2002, 2004). Adrian: It was like I was sick of not being able to find a boyfriend or not being able to have any gay friends or, I used the Internet for that section ... I think I didn't like some of the sites because they were very graphic and again people who use chat are very bitchy. The process of Internet dating involves reading descriptions,writing responses,and exchanging messages.Thus, rapport,mutual self-disclosure, and erotic connections stemming from emotional intimacy are more importantthan physicalattractionand lust (Cooper et al. 2000). In particular, ICT creates a space in which people can constructnarrativesof the self unencumberedby their bodies, rather the body having to be defined and managed through the text. Hardey (2002, 579) argues: "How the body is written and read creates a space for negotiation and disjunctures between the lived body andhow it is seen by others. The domainof the internet dating is, therefore, a space in which individualsseek to close the gap between the embodied and disembodiedself, the public and the private individual, and anonymity and intimacy." Adrian, a young Deaf gay man, explains how he developed an online relationship with a gay man he met on the Internetbefore telling him abouthis hearingimpairment. Yeah I told him on the Internet and I mean I chatted to him for several weeks without telling him that I was D/deaf and then it
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got to the point to tell him and he replied so what, what's that got to do with it? It is a process through which textual displays of emotional humor, intellect, and empathy are importantin establishingmutual chemistry (Cooper et al. 2000). Participantshave to learn to judge textual rather than visual clues in order not to come on too strongly or appeardisinterested,and to recognize when a nonresponse is a signal that the correspondent is not interested in pursuinga relationship.While the asynchronousnature of email communication allows participants more time to think about how they present themselves, at the same time the speed and ease of e-mail exchanges also means it has the advantage of allowing online advertisers to correspond with multiple respondents simultaneously (Jagger 1998; Hardey 2002). There is also some evidence that individualsfeel more confident in taking risks and disclosing intimate information online than they do offline because there are not necessarilyany consequencesof this openness for their everyday offline relationships/friendships, as Peter and Andy explain below. Andy: You feel you're able to say more than you should because you're not talking to that person face-to-face you're just talking to a computer isn't it? You just feel comfortable I think so ... Peter: I often chat on the Internet mainly because you can talk about things with people, and then not have to look them in the face again the following day. Research by Burke (2000) suggests that online lesbian advertisements are more likely to focus on personality and less likely to focus on physical description or appearance than advertisements placed by heterosexuals or gay men. The advertisements are also usually more oriented around a longing for intimacy and love than around sex. In her study Burke (2000) found that only 8 percent of two hundred advertisements were seeking casual sex; rather, most specified that the advertiser was looking for a partner, for friends and maybe more, or for a companion for a specific purpose (e.g., someone to go skiing with). The advertisements frequently used romantic euphemisms such as looking for "someone to walk on
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the beach with," or "undermoonlight," or "to share candlelight dinners" or "to read morning newspapers with" (Burke 2000). The advertisers also stressed the importance of sincerity and emotional availability (no game players, has closure in past relationships, and so on). Other studies have suggested that people tend to seek out those similar to themselves online and to establish their similarity through online talk (Levine 2000). However, some commentators have been more critical of the role of Internet dating, arguing that the Internet puts people in touch with each other but at same time they are distanced from the real concerns, anxieties, and vulnerabilities of those with whom they correspond, and that the Internet is often used for pleasure without any moral responsibility to others (Bauman 1993), for example, in cyber affairs that promote a moral indifference to people's offline private relationships(Heim 1992). Moderators also commonly monitor discussion lists to try to prevent the harassmentof individuals or "flaming"and to try to ensure that participantsare lesbian or gay (Wincpaw 2000). An online relationshipis defined as a romantic or sexual relationship that is initiated via online contact and maintained mainly through electronic conversations(Young et al., in press). Nonetheless, the evidence is that relationshipsbegun online rarely stay there. Park's(1996)study found that two-thirds of online respondentshad formed a personal relationship with someone they had met on line. Likewise, Shaw (1997) reportssimilar results, with all the informants agreeing to meet someone face-to-face whom they had met online at least once, and three-quartersclaiming that they had had physical affairswith men they had met on line. This process of translatinga virtual self/relationship into a flesh-and-blood encounter usually involves postal and telephone, as well as online communication before a face-to-face meeting. While getting to know someone by e-mail exchange contributesto building mutual trust- which, according to Giddens (1992), is a hallmark of intimacy- and thus reducing the risk and embarrassment of a face-to-face meeting, there can still be a gap between online impressionsand the reality of meeting. In particular, communication problems can arise because it is hard to read the tonal qualities, the inflections, of conversations online than in face-to-face encounters and becauseof a lack of physical attraction. I've met three people on the Internet [few words unclear] one of them I had a short relationship with but the other two I'm
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good friends with ... I used to chat for hours and hours to one person and then eventually we'd meet up. This is how I met this person in Manchester you see very dangerous!I got off the train at Manchester and he met me off the train, it was like oh dear right and I didn't know that the gay village was right next to the train station and I thought we were going to have to get a car or a taxi or a bus but it was only a few minutes walk, we sat in the pub, had a few pints and we just chatted away like we'd been friends for years. I think he wanted more off me and he, bearing in mind I was seventeen and he was thirty-one, he wanted more off me and I was like [few words unclear] I wasn't interested I said I just want to be friends, I'm not being funny but I just want to be friends.
CYBERSEX
However, the Internet also offers new erotic possibilities in the form of cybersex, and related services (including online material for entertainment and masturbation, pornography, live sex shows, escort services, and online sex therapists) (Griffiths 2000). In this sense sexuality is not necessarily in the sphere of domestic/home (Correll 1995). Some commentators argue that it has revolutionized the gay men's scene with electronic cruising replacing bar cruising (Tsang 1996, 1). Chat rooms and gay cruising areas share a number of similarities. Both are spaces of intimacy that, while embedded in public environments, are largely visible only to the initiated. Where they differ is that in traditional gay men's cruising areas it is possible to use visual codes to communicate without necessarily requiring any other form of interaction. For example, handkerchief colors and positions can be used to signal sexual preferences/roles. There are also often areas within gay venues where sexual encounters take place, and other spaces where men cruise and observe, and moving between these locations can be used to signal interest or disinterest (Henriksson and Mansson 1995). Online cruising has to be done through text. In a study by Tikkanen and Ross (2000), interviewees recounted how they find sex partners online and describe their sexual preferences. Many preferred this to offline bars, arguing that gay venues are often not very pleasant places- they are frequently marginal parts of the city in run-down buildings and can be expensive (Weightman 1980; Brown 2000)- and it is possible to spend a long time in an
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offline venue before you make contact with someone. The Internet also offers the opportunity to encounter a much wider range of people beyond the local gay scene- particularly to meet those who share very - all from the comfort and familiarispecific sexual interests or fantasies ty of your own home. At the same time it is possible for online users to disguise their own identities. For example, online exchanges of information for cybersex are usually based on a limited description, so it is possible to conceal characteristics that it's not possible to conceal in the flesh, or indeed to create a "fantasyself." The anonymity of sex online is particularly attractive to men who have sex with men (MSMs) but who are not exclusively gay and may therefore be less comfortable being seen in gay-identified venues and more likely to be isolated or have time constraints(Ross et al. 2000). Sex in cyberspace offers commitment-free interaction in much the same way as offline public sex environments (Blair 1998). In this sense, gay cybersex might be considered in Giddens's terms offering the ultimate "purerelationship"in that it is self-focused, essentially democratic, and without commitment. At the same time, in the age of AIDS it is a safer space for sexual play and imagination than are venues for offline sex. In particular the Internet is a good source of information for MSMs who are not part of gay culture and so may not pick up safe-sex messages. For those in societies in which homosexuality or public sex is criminalized, cybersex also offers less risk of being arrested, outed or subjected to homophobic violence - although there is growing state regulation in many places of sex sites that are leading to the criminalization of ICT users. However, the Internet has sensory limitations in that it requires autosimulation; for this reason many men use the Internet to connect with people in their locality (or those who are in places where they are visiting for work or on vacation) so that they might also arrange to meet offline for sex (sometimes literally just to have anonymous sex without speaking) (Wakeford 2000). One irony is that desire can be frustratedby distance- as Probyn (1995) argues, spatial separation accentuates longing. In this sense, one of the paradoxical geometries of the Internet is that while it is often popularly assumed to facilitate thinking globally, individualsstill often prefer to act locally! Clarke (2000) also identifies a link between online sex sites and sex tourism, pointing out that the Internet can contribute to the exoticiza-
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tion of "other"people and "other" places in the West, rather than genuine engagement. Moreover, Bell and Binnie (2000) observe that discussions of diasporic sexual communities unproblematically slip into the assumption that the gay subject is white, affluent, and Western. And of course the potential Utopianpossibilities of the Internet to create global sexual communities and facilitate "pure"relationships need to be tempered by a recognition of the uneven geographies of access to this technology, and the linguistic hegemony of English online.
GEOMETRIES OFINTIMACY
The Internet offers the possibility of rethinking the scaling of intimate relationships (Binnie 2000). Familial and sexual relationships are commonly associated with the space of the home, which is usually understood to provide a refuge from global capital and the implications of globalization (Binnie 2000). However, the Internet offers the possibility to stretch intimacy beyond the boundariesof the domestic. While the individualization thesis and popular concern about rising rates of marital breakup have led some commentators to theorize that intimate- in particular familial- relations are undergoing drastic change, actual practices of intimacy- knowing, loving, and caring for others may not be changing as much as anticipated because the Internet offers a way of rearticulating offline practices of everyday familial life that can, at least in part, compensate for the limits of intimacy elsewhere. Literal closeness is usually considered to be important for close, loving, and caring relations. In the first section of this essay, however, I demonstrated that despite the fact that families are increasingly living together apart, or apart together, distance (in terms of physical or temporal separation, or both) does not necessarily bring intimacy to an end. Rather, the Internet offers a way to be separate and together, providing connections to support familial intimacy in terms of knowing (e.g., exchanging information about thoughts, activities, movements, and so on), loving (by enabling flows of feeling and emotionally binding together dislocated family members), and caring (e.g., Internet shopping for a grandparent or telephone banking for a child) for each other online, such that ICT are not producing fundamentallydifferent types of family behavior but rather a reordering of habits, routines, and relations. Here, I have used the example of both U.K. families living together but apart and transnational families to show how intergenerational
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relationships can be (re)negotiated across different geographical scales from the local to the global. In the second section of the essay I focused on the role of the Internet in facilitating nonnormative cultures of intimacy by considering the example of the way lesbians and gay men use the Internet to develop and access "community"and sexual relationships. Binnie (2004) argues that the local and the global are often configured such that local is seen as site of sexuality, authenticity, and resistance to the global. However, in this section I have highlighted the more complex ways in which the Internet coconstitutes the local/global as sites of lesbian and gay sexuality, while also reconfiguring divisions between what is considered "public" and "private," creating complex geometries of intimacy. Namely, on the one hand, some lesbians and gay men use ICT to connect with people like themselves offline in their local areas for friendship, support, or sex. On the other hand, other lesbians and gay men use the Internet to escape oppressive offline domestic or homophobic local/national relations to enable them to connect with other lesbians and gay men and express their sexuality online at a global scale. In doing so, some lesbians and gay men use the "privacy" afforded by anonymous online communication from the comfort of their home computer to develop sexual relationships without the necessity of going to public spaces such as offline gay bars and clubs. Whereas other lesbians and gay men are closeted in terms of their local offline social relations (e.g., at work, at home, in the community) but publicly "out"in the global arena of cyberspace. In this sense, these complex geometries of intimacy also clearly demonstrate that online and offline worlds cannot be understood as separate or discrete spaces, rather life around the screen and life on the screen are mutually constituted. Of course there are limitations to both "doing family" and "doing sexual intimacy" online. As both sections of this essay have demonstrated, while ICT can facilitate disembodied forms of knowing, loving, caring, and sex, this is not always a substitute for the physical intimacy of a parental hug or a lover's caress. The Internet allows people to stay in touch or get in touch but the absence of actual touch can serve only to accentuate the emotional pain of missing or longing for another body. At the same time, there are potential tensions between "the doing of family life" offline and the use of ICT by individual family members. The Internet can interrupt family life by absorbing an individual's time;
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and can import new problems into the familial home by, for example, facilitating individual members (including children) to develop intimate or sexual connections with others (entirely online or online relationships that are consummated offline) beyond the porous boundaries of the home that might disrupt offline familial and intimate relationships. This might occur not only in terms of the sexual infidelity but also in other ways, for example, if the use of illegal Web sites leads to one family member's committing a criminal offense and bringing shame on the whole family. In other words, "doing sexual intimacy" online can also potentially contribute to the "undoingof family" offline. In sum, these complexities illustrate that ICT do not necessarily impact on "the doing of intimacy" in fixed ways, either positive or negative. Rather, the extent to which ICT support and facilitate offline intimacies or challenge and undermine them will depend on the different ways that use of the technologies emerge in practice in the context of different families/relationships.
VALENTINE GILL is professor of geography at the University of Leeds. She has an international reputation for theoretically informed empirical work that is methodologically innovative and has popular and policy impacts. Her research interests include social identities, citizenship and belonging, children and parenting, consumption cultures (especially in relation to food and drink), and research methods. Gill has been awarded research grants and contracts from research councils, charities, government departments, and nongovernmental organizations to a value of more than one million pounds (British). Her most recent book is Public
Space and the Cultureof Childhood(Ashgate, 2004).
NOTES
1. Although its importantto recognize that this is often dependenton an ability to communicate in English given the prevalence of English language lesbian and gay sites on the Internet.
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Globalizing Intimacy: The Role of Information and Communication Technologies in Maintaining and Creating Relationships Author(s): Gill Valentine

APART THOUGH TOGETHER: CONSTITUTING AND FAMILIAL MAINTAINING RELATIONSHIPS ONLINE

LIVING TOGETHER APART

LIVING APART TOGETHER

NEW CREATING INTIMACIES

SEARCHING MATES? FOR SOUL

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