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

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.

What Is “Publicly Available Data”? Exploring Blurred Public–Private Boundaries and Ethical Practices Through a Case Study on Instagram

“…Recent work on intimate publics and digital culture also raises important ethical questions around how markets and platforms co-opt, represent, and reframe intimate data that are displayed online. In these contexts, for example, Dobson et al argue that, ironically, “public intimacies are not public enough in the sense that participants have little control over what platforms do with their intimate relationships” (2018, p. 22). Scholars scraping “intimate data” without permission, or without engaging the producers of such data, might be accountable to similar ethical questions or concerns.…”

Performing (In)justice: The Contentious Politics of Digitally Mediated Visuals

“…To date, her YouTube channel offers over 1000 videos situated across a variety of genres, including makeup tutorials, Q&As, confessional talks, travels, and so forth. Ultimately, I argue that the playfulness and creativity of Rhaze's digitally mediated visuals embody the paradoxes of global interracial marriages, as accessed and interpreted by a 'digital intimate public' (Dobson, Robards, & Carah, 2018).…”

The Defence of Aachaaram, Femininity, and Neo-Savarna Power in Kerala

“…I draw here from Lauren Berlant’s concept of the ‘intimate public’ (1988), in which people who may never meet may nevertheless connect around common interests. However, though this is of course different from digital publics that take shape around private, intimate matters, such as theorized, for instance, in the work of Dobson, Robards, & Carah (2018), the digital intimate public around Hindutva is often rich in very personal accounts of families and homes. Even when not part of closed groups, Hindutva circles on Facebook are intimate also because of the constant evocation of familial tropes that bind disparate individuals together partaking of Hindutva ideology to different degrees and in different ways; engagement is possible not only through comments and responses but also through mere ‘likes’.…”