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Category: Science and Technology
Date Submitted: 11/19/2015 12:44 AM
DE GRUYTER MOUTON
Communications 2015; 40(3): 319–340
Sander de Ridder* and Sofie van Bauwel
Youth and intimate media cultures:
Gender, sexuality, relationships, and
desire as storytelling practices in social
networking sites
DOI 10.1515/commun-2015-0012
Abstract: This paper investigates how young people give meaning to gender,
sexuality, relationships, and desire in the popular social networking site (SNS)
Netlog. In arguing how SNSs are important spaces for intimate politics, the
extent to which Netlog is a space that allows contestations of intimate stories
and a voicing of difference is questioned. These intimate stories should be understood as self-representational media practices; young people make sense of
their intimate stories in SNSs through media cultures. Media cultures reflect
how audiences and SNS institutions make sense of intimacy. This paper concludes that intimate stories as media practices in the SNS Netlog are structured
around creativity, anonymity, authenticity, performativity, bricolage and intertextuality. The intimate storytelling practices focusing on creativity, anonymity,
bricolage and intertextuality are particularly significant for a diversity of intimacies to proliferate.
Keywords: Youth, Social networking sites, self-representations, intimacy, media
culture, popular culture, authenticity, anonymity
1 Introduction
Relying on tendencies of late modernity such as the transformation of intimacy
(Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995; Giddens 1992), sociologists of sexuality have
documented how our personal intimate lives have become increasingly intertwined with the public arena (Plummer 2003; Weeks 1998). Ken Plummer
*Corresponding Author: Sander de Ridder, Postdoctoral Fellow Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), Ghent University, Centre for Cinema and Media Studies,
E-mail: Sander.DeRidder@UGent.be
Sofie van Bauwel, Department of Communications Sciences, Ghent University,
E-mail: Sofie.VanBauwel@UGent.be...