Dating apps as digital flyovers: Mobile media and global intimacies in a postcolonial city

This chapter is about middle-class millennial Filipino women and their experiences of mediated global intimacies in the Philippines postcolonial capital of Manila. It focuses on their use of mobile technologies in exploring relationships with foreign men, and Westerners particularly. Drawing on an 18-month ethnographic research, this chapter sheds light on how the women use mobile apps to enact a distinct and temporary resolution to the challenges of experiencing global intimacies in a postcolonial city. Specifically, they construct what we call ‘digital flyovers’, that is, digital infrastructures borne out of dating apps and other mobile media that allow them to bypass what they think to be ‘uncosmopolitan’ Filipino men and to connect with foreign romantic prospects who share their own ‘globalised’ backgrounds and sensibilities. We show that, on one hand, these digital flyovers demonstrate how the women do have the privilege of accessing spaces conducive to cosmopolitan global intimacies, something that is elusive for most people in the Philippines. We also underscore, on the other hand, that these digital flyovers do nothing to change the ‘foundations’ of the society beneath them, which means that middle-class Manila’s distinct social dynamics continue to persist in their romantic and sexual lives

Mobile media and the rise of ‘glocal intimacies’ in Asia

Although ‘intimacy’ has been often construed as the relationship between two individuals, we contend that these are also ‘social’ and are always imbricated in broader social dynamics. In Asia, the social dimension of intimacies, whether romantic, familial, or communal, is very much pronounced. Crucially, it is also increasingly enacted through mobile media. We argue that these ubiquitous mobile technologies have contributed to the transformation of intimate social relationships in the region. We underscore especially that they have become central to people’s experiences of what we call ‘glocal intimacies’. By this we mean that such technologies have both normalised and intensified how people’s interpersonal relationships are entangled in the ever-shifting and constantly negotiated flows between global modernity and local everyday life. This is particularly evident when they seek to use mobile media to reconfigure their local ties and to enact global relationships. These experiences powerfully exemplify how their mediated intimacies are caught between the homogenising influence of the global and the persistent grounding of the local