Social networking sites and mediatized intimacies in youth cultures: new regimes of control

Starting from the observation that young people live their intimacies in everyday life as intertwined with digital media such as social networking sites, this paper inquires the mediatization of intimacy. Arguing that digital media cultures have become primary resources in the social and cultural organization of intimacy, new regimes of control are introduced. This contribution relies on the main conclusions of a four-year research project, exploring the social and cultural organisations of young people’s (14-18) intimate stories. Intimate stories are seen as everyday communicative interactions that give meaning to a diversity of genders, sexualities, relationship and desires. Within this presentation, intimate storytelling will be related to the use of popular social networking sites. Drawing on an 18-months participatory observation of young people’s (N=200) intimate storytelling practices in a popular social networking site, and focus groups (N=8, 51 participants) research that inquired young people’s intimate experiences related to the use of popular social networking sites; this presentation explores intimate storytelling as a media practice. This contribution will argue how particular understandings of the intimate self and intimate identities in popular social networking sites, relates to strong claims about the existence of an authentic and real intimate self. These claims argue a coherent intimate self, instead of allowing, diversity and fragmentation. It is shown how these claims are connected to particular media ideologies; people’s ideas about social media that have the power to shape intimate interactions broadly oriented towards digital networked media. These new regimes that are controlling intimacy draw on intensive peer control over communicative interactions in social networking sites, fear imagined audiences and eventually self-disciplining. These mediatized complexities have become increasingly important to understand young people’s intimate sexualities, who are currently increasingly lived with ubiquitous digital media applications