Co-presence and family

Mobile Communication and Urban/Rural Flows in a South African Marginalised Community

“…The concept has been applied across various contexts concerning the flow of people, information, capital, goods or artefacts, among others (see, for example, Albrechts & Coppens, 2003;Stalder & Paris, 2001). While the original emphasis is on distant, realtime communication (see Castells, 1996;Castells, 2004), a focus on time-sharing social practices and distant presence (see Döbler, 2019) encompasses the relationship between an increasingly widespread telecommunication infrastructure and a closelyknit community such as Dwesa, characterised by strong interpersonal and family ties, and attachment to a specific locale (Castells, 1999). Castells et al (2007) note that while a space of flows is not placeless, its structure and meaning derive from networked relationships.…”

Different by Culture

“…Besides structural features such as mobility, spatial distance, etc. (Craveiro et al, 2013), social life is impacted by conceptualizations of social relationships regarding size, foundation, density, reliability, and functionality of social networks (Crossley et al, 2015;Lüscher, 2002), forms and degrees of presence, i.e., who should be present for whom in which way, intensity, and frequency (Döbler, 2019a(Döbler, , 2020b, consequences of belonging to collectives or families, given and desired nature of interpersonal, intergenerational connectedness and inclusion (Craveiro et al, 2013;Westin & Danielson, 2007), based either on the quality of relationships (Craveiro et al, 2013;Silverstein, Gans, Lowenstein, Giarrusso, & Bengtson, 2010;Zhang & Wang, 2010) or on biological (e.g., blood), legal (e.g., marriage or adoption), or contractual (e.g., with caring staff) groundings.…”

A Kiss is Just a Kiss? (Im)Possibilities of Being Present

“…Instead, in a much more general sense they know at least tacitly about the inequality of physical and social presence, the existence of different forms of copresence and their respective strengths or weaknesses. This means, they are accustomed with various (im)possibilities of being and becoming present (Döbler, 2020) such as being practiced in employing media for realising interactions, i.e., in creating copresence in form of (quasi) social situations through synchronisation via phone or video-call (Goffman, 1989;Döbler, 2019); they are familiar with the preconditions of focused encounters (Goffman, 1963(Goffman, , 1971 which are not limited to being physically present; and they are used to the temporal impossibility to kiss, hug, touch, as these bodily practices are limited to physical copresence (Döbler, 2020).…”

“…These couples' planning usually centre on mobility and the reestablishment of copresence with their partners, the oscillation between impossibilities and possibilities of kissing. Today, though, for many people it is the modified perception of the body and the medical emergency which shapes experiencing and observing kisses, while it is the false equation of social, cognitive, emotional and physical presence which impacts the (im)possibilities of interacting in general (Döbler, 2019(Döbler, , 2020.…”