Public Intimacy on social media -extimacy as connected presence

The modern experience of intimacy and sociality is being radically transformed, impacting not just the quality of social relationships but also the experience of the self and the borders between private and public expressions of the self. Social media are prime aspects of today’s intimacy practices....

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Mateus, Samuel
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2024
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Sevilla (US)
Repositorio:idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla
OAI Identifier:oai:idus.us.es:11441/157304
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/11441/157304
https://doi.org/10.12795/Ambitos.2024.i64.10
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Extimacy
Public intimacy
Connected presence
Social media
Digital rights
Extimidad
Intimidad pública
Presencia conectada
Medios sociales
Derechos digitales
Descripción
Sumario:The modern experience of intimacy and sociality is being radically transformed, impacting not just the quality of social relationships but also the experience of the self and the borders between private and public expressions of the self. Social media are prime aspects of today’s intimacy practices. They fulfil a need and desire for (remote) communications and a feeling of (mediated) connection. The contemporary transformations regarding intimacy are presented in this paper. It is stated as a hypothesis that a reordering of the private and public realms has been happening since the 20th century, requiring a new theory of publicity and publicness. Only a reconceptualization of the modern notions of “public” and “private” enables us to fully understand the mutations in public intimacy provoked by social media. The objective is to demonstrate that media modulates intimacy, and concepts such as extimacy and connected presence are needed to fully comprehend and evaluate it. This work begins by recounting the transformations in modern intimacy and its contemporary redefinition. Then, a characterization of the contemporary articulations of intimacy is drawn, and the implications of extimacy for the individual in the context of highly mediatized societies are presented. It is argued that extimacy involves a complete reformulation of modern intimacy in direction or a malleable, fluid, and negotiated, public intimacy. It is even more important today as growing differentiation and performativity in social life demand the management of social relations.