Together while apart? Mediating Relationships and Intimacy

This special issue of Networking Knowledge seeks to explore how interpersonal relationships are mediated in contemporary contexts. Digital technologies and practices associated with them enable us to interact with our social network of support in a seemingly easy way: we just need to use the touch of a finger to show that we care. However, it also takes the same effort and the same fingertips to demonstrate hate. Interrogating the pragmatics of mediated affection and disaffect has become a necessity. In mediated interpersonal relationships, the intimate and the emotional are often subjected to a set of infrastructures, somewhere else called affordances (Chemero, 2003; Wright and Parchoma, 2011), as well as to set of practices (Couldry, 2002). The contributions that make up Together While Apart? highlight the emotive dimension of mediated communication. The common thread of all contributions to this issue is the focus on how relationships, intimacy and (dis)affect are constituted and negotiated through media.