MACMILLAN Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media (Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change)

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. Review “The study of digital intimacies has emerged as an important new way of conceptualizing our connections both with and through digital technology. Using the frame of ‘digital intimate publics’, Dobson, Robards and Carah have brought together a fascinating set of reflections on intimacies which range across the terrains of kin, sex, love and beyond. This is an important collection for students and scholars who are interested in digital cultures and social media.” (Feona  Attwood, Professor of Cultural Studies, Communication and Media, Middlesex University, UK)  “Social media platforms are now centrally part of our intimate lives, the central mechanism by which our intimate private lives are made public. In this lively and unique anthology, Amy Dobson, Brady Robards, and Nicholas Carah bring together essays by diverse scholars who take the digital as a context for understanding broader cultural, economic and political questions about intimacies and everyday life. The reach of the book is expansive, with essays tracing the ways our private lives are made public through the digital in issues of love, sex, dating, friendship, and death. The essays gathered here are smart, incisive analyses of histories, identity, affect, and subjectivities―and how these are expressed, challenged, and solidified in the digital world―this is a key book for our contemporary age.” (Sarah Banet Weiser, Professor & Head of the Media & Communications Department, London School of Economics, UK)  “The idea of a neat division between the private and the public was always problematic, but digital media have complicated things considerably. This carefully curated collection of insightful chapters reveals how the closest of personal intimacies can take place on public platforms, and how large-scale publics can emerge from microsocial interactions. Taken as a whole, the book tells the story of how we are learning to be together in a digitally mediated world.” (Jean Burgess, Professor of Digital Media and Director of the Digital Media Research Centre, QUT, Australia) “What is intimacy, and how is it being re-mediated in the context of the wide-ranging transformations in everyday life in a world that is now saturated with social media, apps and other digital infrastructures? This smart, empirically engaging collection explores this question through a range of case studies and essays put together by an exciting new generation of digital cultural scholars. Bringing queer and feminist theories into articulation with debates about the meaning and value of networked publics, this book will change how we think about feelings and attachments that will be at once strange and familiar to all those whose lives and identities have become subject to the conditions of mediati