“And somehow it ends up on the Internet.” Agency, trust and risks in photo-sharing among friends and romantic partners

Abstract

Photographic practices and photo-sharing have become pervasive routine communicative acts in everyday life. Photo-sharing can be beneficial for maintaining and strengthening social relationships, but it also requires a careful reflections of trustful disclosure, intimacy, privacy and vulnerability. Several scholars have found that conflicts regarding photo-sharing arise when assumptions regarding the “shareability” of pictures and an “appropriate” amount of photo-sharing differ. This demands for further insights into which practices are considered appropriate or inappropriate and for which reasons. The present study explores norms and rules of taking and sharing pictures and examines how these norms are defined in close relationships, more precisely in romantic partnerships and friendships. It is based on 34 repertoire-oriented, semi-structured interviews that are combined with creative visual methods. The analysis shows that trust, confidentiality and consent are the fundamental conditions for photo-sharing in close relationships. However, when it comes to negative causes and consequences of photo-sharing, trust and confidentiality are at the same time considered as unreliable and fragile constructs. Usually, the image-makers are held responsible for unintended sharing and re-sharing. Further responsibility is ascribed to invisible agents and insecure technological structures, while other involved persons are not described as accountable agents. This implies that the fragility of trust in relationships needs to be anticipated in sharing processes. We argue that this necessitates further critical discussions of responsibilities, agency and trust in order to sustain the value and importance of close relationships in current digitally networked societies.

Offline and Online Sexual Risk Behavior among Youth in the Netherlands: Findings from “Sex under the Age of 25”

“…This might be because boys not only perceive less risk but also actually are less at risk of negative outcomes of sexting, compared to girls. For girls, a leaked nude photo might elicit more (perceived) negative reactions from others, in which they are also blamed for what happened [i.e., “slut-shaming” ( 40 )], leading to feelings of shame and guilt and a decrease in their social status ( 41 ). This higher perceived risk might cause girls to be more reluctant to display these behaviors during a videochat.…”

Dark web advertising: the dark magic system on Tor hidden service search engines

“…Nurse argues that data thieves exploit 'the nature to overshare [and] the poor management of security and privacy online' (Nurse 2019, 10). 2 The exploitation of 'oversharing' is the same logic that drives so-called 'revenge pornography,' a form of 'non-consensual pornography, sexually explicit photographs that were exchanged in a trustful communicative space are made public or are shared without the permission of the depicted individual; with harmful consequences' (Venema and Lobinger 2017). 3 Some of the marketplaces advertising on Dark Web search engines include vendors selling 'Nude sex pictures from many ex girlfriends.'…”

Nudes are Forever: Judicial Interpretations of Digital Technology’s Impact on “Revenge Porn”

“…As a result of smartphones and social media sites that allow (and encourage) users to share photos, both photo creation and sharing have become an extremely common and frequent activity for many people (Hand 2016; Sturken 2016). The fact that 350 million photos are uploaded to Facebook per day demonstrates both the ubiquity of digital photo-sharing and the ways that photography has become “networked,” as photographs are now regularly created for the purpose of visual communication rather than for memory preservation purposes (Venema and Lobinger 2017; Hand 2012). Furthermore, while Sontag (2003, 174) once wrote that “photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid”, digital photographs are now seen as excessively persistent.…”