More-than-human, more-than-digital: Postdigital intimacies as a theoretical framework

In this article, we extend the concept of “postdigital intimacies” by developing its more-than-human and more-than-digital capacities. We argue that while we have witnessed a gradual flattening out of the digital and non-digital, our institutions, regulations, laws, ethics, and policies still make distinctions between digital experiences and “real life.” This demands a refinement of critical understandings of intimacy. We locate postdigital intimacies in accounts that situate intimacy as ambivalent, and draw on posthuman and new feminist materialism to argue for the interdependencies between human and non-human agencies, making intimacy something always more-than-human. In turn, we develop accounts of the postdigital that suggest a more-than-digital by highlighting experiences of an entangled digital and non-digital, and the practical implications of this for how we advocate approaching health, safety, well-being, and anti-harassment. We bring these two bodies of work together through two distinct examples: one of the intimate therapeutics of AI chatbots and the other in how young people navigate technology-facilitated sexual violence in schools. We argue that a theory of postdigital intimacies demonstrates the importance of thinking through the more-than-human and more-than-digital of intimacy in relation to regulation, policy, and research pertaining to harms, risk, and vulnerability.