The extent to which digital technologies have become integrated into everyday lives raises concerns regarding their impact on relationships - with other humans and non-human entities. Ethnography is an essential tool in investigating how the various affordances of digital devices and platforms distinctively co-produce relationality. Against this backdrop, it is important to also reflect on the hopes, fears, and imaginations digital technologies facilitate. In what form do they relate to the past and to potential futures?
Our panel invites discussions around intensifying digitalization and different experiences, temporalities, and discursive formations at play. It also focuses on how challenges, tensions, and insecurities that accompany technologies are navigated. Social media platforms are not all the same. They open up various scales and parameters of sociality, and thus more options in terms of what shape connecting may take (Miller, 2016). Their impact is therefore anything but predetermined or universal. Digital technologies can bring along hopes of building trust and creating new futures, but at the same time entrap their users through the politics of tech capitalism (Pype, 2021a). The temporal politics they produce may bring people together, but they can also produce disconnection (Pype, 2021b). It is a socio-technical experience informed through technology and various social actors – and not determined by technology (Pype, 2016). Moreover, digital media carry potential for co-productive and creative ways of making sense of relationships that are complicated by violent pasts (see Miyarrka Media group, 2019). Given these various entanglements, this panel intends to build on previous work and stimulate further conversation around imaginative manners of relating (with fellow humans, institutions, the planet, and oneself) through technologies. We ask what visions and ideologies ‘connectivity’ might entail and how these inform relationality. How does digital mediation affect the ways in which personal relationships are cared for, nurtured, and navigated?
