This open access Palgrave Pivot examines how mobile apps organise emotional life, digital intimacy and everyday forms of platform power. Bringing platform studies and app studies into dialogue with digital sociology, feminist theory and the sociology of emotions, Tanja Bosch develops four connected concepts: affective legibility, calibrated intimacy, emotional governance and the soft power of apps.

Through critical autoethnography, interface analysis, reflective diaries, screenshots and platform data, the book follows embodied, ambient, precarious and domestic forms of app-based intimacy. It considers fitness tracking through Garmin Connect and Strava; recommendation and everyday accompaniment through Spotify, Instagram and Google Maps; uneven visibility and risk on Tinder and TikTok; and protective surveillance through Life360, smart-home systems and menstrual tracking apps. Across these settings, metrics, notifications, recommendations and feedback loops make feelings, bodies and relationships legible while shaping expectations of progress, care, safety and recognition.

Grounded in South African experience and attentive to majority-world infrastructures, the book develops concepts for understanding digital intimacy across platform societies. It shows how prepaid data, interrupted electricity, racialised inequality, gendered vulnerability and uneven infrastructures of safety expose assumptions of continuous connectivity in platform theory. It also traces how users negotiate platform power through selective visibility, opacity, refusal and disconnection. Calibrated Intimacies offers a new conceptual vocabulary for understanding how care and control become entangled in the ordinary infrastructures of app-based life.

Tanja Bosch is Professor of Media Studies and Production at the Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa. They are the author of Broadcasting Democracy (2017), Social Media and Everyday Life in South Africa (2020); co-editor of Digital Citizenship in Africa (2023), Feminist Digital Citizenship in Africa (2025) and The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (2nd edition, forthcoming). Holding the position of NRF South African Research (SARChI) Chair in Digital Media Sociology, they research platform power and African digital cultures.