A touch on the screen, a tap on the keyboard, and we can communicate instantly with someone in another time-zone thousands of miles away. Digital technologies bring us the possibilities of connection, freedom, intimacies, pleasure, validation and visibility. For some people, digital spaces are the only place they can be, or explore being, who they truly are. Alongside this, digital spaces also hold the threat of surveillance, exposure, and abuse. The other side of the coin, as it were. Still, they afford us intimacies – emotional, erotic, platonic, sexual – that we may or may not be able to experience offline.

In thinking about digital intimacies and the future of humans, Suchitra Dalvie explores questions of connection, feelings, biology, gender, reproduction, and ethics. The conclusion could be dystopic, but it’s not. Breathe easy.

Of course, it’s not all sunshine and roses. Aratrika Datta sketches in broad strokes the illusion of connection and choice that the digital world offers. This is so especially for women and gender and sexual minorities. The fear of moral policing, abuse and violence push vulnerability and honesty, the main ingredients of intimacy, to the edges. Daraa Patel examines some possible factors underlying the climate of fear and risk that surrounds women’s digital intimacies and suggests ways of re-imagining and re-framing, online conversation and discourse. Debjani Chakraborty takes us into rural digital life, where individual choice doesn’t stand a chance when devices and passwords are expected to be shared. In the intimacy of collective living, it is not strangers but one’s immediate peers who act as agents of surveillance to ensure that one does not ‘know too much’.

But yet, but yet. We humans are sometimes able to squeeze kindness out of a stone. And love out of nowhere. Chitrangi Kakoti, living in a land far from home, finds not a cure for loneliness, but new shapes and forms of intimacy– a continuing no-pressure acceptance and a love that holds – in the steady glow of her screen. For Taarina Therese Chandiramani, technology allows for layers of meaning and feeling to gently rise up and lets a longing she didn’t even know she felt make itself known. Apoorva Ravi finds that an online ‘bestie’ is the perfect companion on an adventure she has long yearned for but never had the courage to embark on.

Digital intimacies inspire poems too. From the misty hills of Sikkim, Lungmying Lepcha writes a poem about Kancha and Kanchi and leaves us wondering what will happen next. Shruti Sharma’s poem is about what an online utopia offers and why it is better than ‘reality’.

And then there is always art. Shipra Gautam offers an unexpected response to intrusive questions online.

In Hindi, we bring you two original articles. Salman Mujawar tells us through real cases how Meri Trustline reframes digital abuse as an emotional and social issue, not just a legal one, because healing from online abuse begins not with reporting but with being heard. Imran Khan writes about how digital harms are unevenly distributed across caste, class, and geography but queer and trans communities continue to resist by building safer networks and demanding structural accountability.

Digital technologies and spaces are the loom on which we weave tapestries of connections and intimacies – emotional, erotic, platonic, sexual. These intimacies have a texture. This month’s offerings bring us an array of these textures – smooth, silky, soft, bumpy, ridged, rough, and even jagged. And, sometimes, all of it, all together.

Of what material is the tapestry of intimacies that we create online woven? What does its texture feel like? What goes into its making? Shikha Aleya finds all the textures of intimacy in her analysis of the responses to our online survey for young people on Digital Intimacies and Sexuality. Over 80 young people aged between 18 and 30 years responded, and shared their experiences. Our thanks to all of them.

Maya Indira Ganesh reminds us that how the loom is set up and how we use it yield what we weave. In a scintillating interview with Shikha Aleya, Maya takes us into different lived environments in the digital world and the ambivalent connection between sexuality and digital intimacy.

Weaving this tapestry can be an act of creating and keeping memories, and, perhaps, of losing and finding ourselves again. And so, Vani Viswanathan tenderly walks us back to the days when blogging was a way to share textual snapshots of one’s experiences and thoughts with the world. A time of gentleness, ease and generosity without fear of immediate backlash in less than 280 characters. For Rajlakshmi Bhagawati, we go online to see, to be seen, to share and to remember. Offering examples of the many ways we connect and create meaning online, Rajlakshmi rightly reckons that digital intimacy lives in the everyday acts of showing up. In an experiential narration of intimacy, Niv, Vanshika Gupta and Anjani Chadha show how the fragmentation of ourselves across different digital spaces may not be a failure of authenticity but a strategy for survival, a way of indeed being authentic.

Himani Bajaj tells us stories of real women to show how the digital world offers options to build intimate connections, however ephemeral or long-lasting, on women’s own terms. How might these redefine our expectations of intimacy, commitment, and connection, she asks. Online spaces do redefine, and sometimes more than meet, our expectations. Often in the most unexpected and delightful ways as we find out in Tejal K’s intriguing short story.

And when the textures get rough and jagged, and people in online spaces fail us or hurt us, there is help at hand. Ruta Sawant brings us an English translation of Salman Mujawar’s Hindi article on the Meri Trustline that reframes digital abuse as an emotional and social issue, not just a legal one, because healing from online abuse begins not with reporting but with being heard.

In Hindi we bring you two articles. One about asexual people and the other about people living in rural communities. As a space for connection, dating apps and online platforms posit sex as central to relationships. This further pushes asexual people to the margins. Imran Khan writes about how asexual people are redefining intimacy beyond sex and carving out safer digital spaces for themselves (and others). In translation we have Debjani Chakraborti’s article about the difficulties of negotiating digital intimacies in rural settings of collective living, where accounts, devices and passwords are not private.

Intimacies are precious. Sometimes we realise that only when they are gone. Enjoy yours – wherever you find them.
Stay connected. Stay safe.

Cover image by Kristian Chalakov for Fine Acts_Landscape