Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media

Amy Shields Dobson, Brady Robards, Nicholas Carah, Amy Shields Dobson, Brady Robards, Nicholas Carah

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319976068
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319976075
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores emergent intimate practices in social media cultures. It examines new digital intimacies as they are constituted, lived, and commodified via social media platforms. The study of social media practices has come to offer unique insights into questions about what happens to power dynamics when intimate practices are made public, about intimacy as public and political, and as defined by cultural politics and pedagogies, institutions, technologies, and geographies. This book forges new pathways in the scholarship of digital cultures by fusing queer and feminist accounts of intimate publics with critical scholarship on digital identities and everyday social media practices. The collection brings together a diverse range of carefully selected, cutting-edge case studies and groundbreaking theoretical work on topics such as selfies, oversharing, hook-up apps, sexting, Gamergate, death and grief online, and transnational family life. The book is divided into three parts: 'Shaping Intimacy', 'Public Bodies', and 'Negotiating Intimacy'. Overarching themes include identity politics, memory, platform economics, work and labour, and everyday media practices.

Part IShaping Intimacy

© The Author(s) 2018

A. S. Dobson et al. (eds.)Digital Intimate Publics and Social MediaPalgrave Studies in Communication for Social Changehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97607-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media: Towards Theorising Public Lives on Private Platforms

Amy Shields Dobson¹ , Nicholas Carah² and Brady Robards³

(1)

Curtin University, Perth, WA, Australia

(2)

University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

(3)

Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Amy Shields Dobson (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Nicholas Carah

Email: [email protected]

Brady Robards

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

We usually think about intimacy as to do with our private, personal lives, as describing feelings and relationships that are most inner, most ‘inward to one’s personhood’ (McGlotten 2013, p. 1), and concerned with relationships that are most important to us. Sociologists have theorised intimacy as centrally involving mutual self-disclosure (Giddens 1992), time spent in co-presence, physical affection, and acts of practical care (Jameison 2011). But, as queer theory and sexuality studies tell us, intimacy is very much socially sanctioned, defined by institutions, laws, and normative social pressures (Berlant 1998; Plummer 2003). The sociology of intimacy helps illuminate what, specifically and empirically, is involved in the doing of intimacy in different places and cultures, and for different genders, classes, and social groups. Queer and feminist critical cultural theorists like Berlant have explained how, in late modern cultures, having a ‘life’ has become equated with having an intimate life (Berlant 1998, p. 282). Further, as Cefai and Couldry note, ‘What queer theory has taught us is that heteronormativity shapes what can appear to us as “intimate” even in settings where questions of sexual identity are typically not articulated as such’ (2017, p. 2). Understandings of intimacy are culturally and socially specific, rather than ‘global’ or ‘universal’ (Jameison 2011). However, in many places right now intimacy names ‘the affective encounters with others that often matter most’ (McGlotten 2013, p. 1). From the perspective of poststructuralist queer and feminist theory, producing intimacy can be understood as part of subjectification processes that centrally involve the hierarchical ordering of relationships and psychic concerns, in socially legible ways, in order to make sense of ourselves and those around us. How social media figures in such processes of psychically and materially ordering relationships and shaping what appears as intimate is part of what we consider in this collection. In this chapter, and this collection more broadly, we are interested in how social media practices challenge and disrupt, as well as how they reinforce and concretise (hetero)normative notions of intimacy as a concept that creates boundaries around certain relationships and ethics of care. Social media are now centrally involved in processes whereby pedagogies of intimate life as life itself are learnt, reproduced, given value , contested, and exploited.

Theorising Digital Intimate Publics

Excessive and Ambivalent Publicisation

Shaka McGlotten (2013, p. 2) argues that social concerns and ‘technophobic panics’ about the impact of new technologies on our lives have always turned on questions of intimacy. These concerns are intensified by the ubiquity of smartphones, social media , and hook-up apps. ‘Virtual intimacies’, McGlotten suggests, are often publicly constructed as ‘failed intimacies that disrupt the flow of a good life lived right, that is, a life that involves coupling and kids, or at least, coupling and consumption’ (2013, p. 7). Other scholars of digital intimacies have observed similarly derisive cultural attitudes towards digital, mediated, and ‘virtual’ forms of intimacy as potentially ‘diminished and dangerous corruption[s] of the real thing’ (McGlotten 2013, p. 7; see also Attwood 2006; Chambers 2013; Jamieson 2013; Hobbs et al. 2016). However, intimacies mediated via contemporary social media platforms need to be understood not only in relation to moral panics over the potential weakening of social ties and intimate relations in the digital age, but also in relation to the commodification of relationships built into social media platform infrastructure ; that is, in relation to privately owned platforms as places where (hetero)normativities and ‘good lives’ are represented, circulated, constituted, and sold (back) to us (Bucher 2012; Dean 2010; Van Dijk 2013; Marwick 2013; Duffy and Hund 2015). In short, digital intimate publics , like the intimate publics Berlant (2008) describes as constituted via other kinds of mass media address and representation, are complex and ‘ambivalent’ (Banet-Weiser 2012) in their aesthetics and politics.

Berlant (2008) describes the creation of intimate publics through mass media discourses and texts as scenes of mass intimacy, identification, and subjectification. An intimate public operates, she suggests, ‘when a market opens up to a block of consumers, claiming to circulate texts and things that express those people’s particular core interests and desires’ (2008, p. 5). Intimate publics create shared worldviews and shared emotional knowledge. They are ‘a space of mediation in which the personal is refracted through the general’ (2008, p. viii). An intimate public, she writes, ‘flourishes as a porous, affective scene of identification among strangers that promises a certain experience of belonging and provides a complex of consolation, confirmation, discipline, and discussion about how to live as an “x”’ (2008, p. viii). Intimate publics can be understood as scenes—centred around media and culture—of the commodification of intimacy, self, and political identities; pedagogical discipline about normativity and normative intimate desires for different groups of subjects; as well as cultural scenes that promise and generate feelings of belonging and consolation.

Such scenes now play out across social and mobile media , as the chapters in this collection illustrate vividly. Social media, as Hjorth and Arnold (2013, p. 125) argue, ‘constitute a new socio-technical institutionalisation of public intimacy’. Some scholars have suggested that new modes of intimacy and visual sexual practices are emerging due to a confluence of social, historical, material and design ‘actants’ (Race 2015; Dowsett 2015; Cover, this volume; Hart, this volume). In more mundane, less spectacular ways, the social and cultural meaning of ‘intimacy’ is currently being contested and struggled over via debates about and use of social media . Media commentary about social media frequently air concerns about the ‘excessive’ publicisation of intimate relations and experiences. Are people ‘oversharing ’ information deemed personal (see Kennedy, this volume)? Do they speak too publicly, too frequently, or share too many images documenting aspects of everyday life deemed pedestrian, mundane, uninteresting or crass? Concerns frequently revolve around the possibility that social media makes it possible for people to: document the routines of their everyday lives (Kofoed and Larsen 2016); fashion themselves as micro-celebrities and seek ‘attention’ (Senft 2008; Marwick and boyd 2011; Abidin 2016); view and share images of sex and bodies (Mulholland 2013; Albury 2015; Dobson 2015); and, that young people in particular are harmed by sharing images of their own bodies and sexuality (Ringrose et al. 2013; Albury 2015; Dobson and Ringrose 2016; Dobson and Coffey 2015). Such concerns are symptomatic of cultural contestations over the meaning of intimacy in the era of social media . These concerns revolve around the moralisation of certain ‘excesses’: of personal information, images, bodies, self-images, emotions (Hendry 2014). Further, public self-telling and display are coded as ‘excessive’ and pathological for some bodies, while celebrated for others in ways that are deeply structured by gender , race , and class (Senft 2012; Skeggs and Woods 2012; Pitcan et al. 2018).

The theoretical frame of ‘intimate publics ’ helps us think about how contestations over power play out in the generative, liminal space where the public and private intermingle. Berlant and Warner (1998) advocate for a publicisation of the intimate that speaks against privatisation, in the sense of both space and property, with an understanding of the deep connection between the prioritisation of private property rights and private (heteronormative) spaces and familial relations. In their account, the politics of intimacy in public, beyond seeking safety and acceptance of a range of sexual and gender practices and identiti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Shaping Intimacy
• Part II. Public Bodies
• Part III. Negotiating Intimacy
• Back Matter