Presumed intimacy: Para-social relationships in media, society & celebrity culture by Chris Rojek (original) (raw)
Related papers
Public Intimacy in Social Media: The Mass Audience as a Third Party
Media, Culture & Society, 2021
This study presents a novel analysis of social media as a staged performance of interpersonal ties in front of a third party, here defined as public intimacy. This concept moves away from the current focus on the presentation of self in social media to the performance of relationships. Users of social media are compared to an interactive audience in a round theater. As inner-circle network members display their exclusive ties in front of other users they may also tease them into joining the conversation. Building on studies of Simmelian ties, interactive exchange, and phatic communication the study presents six characteristics of public intimacy along with brief examples drawn from users’ experiences on Facebook and Twitter. It is concluded that by mediating the shift from dyad to triad and from triad to mass community social media do not necessarily entail a reduction in intimacy but rather a concretization of social relations. The recursive relationship between interpersonal ties and mass solidarity is sustained and reaffirmed thanks to triadic interactions of public intimacy.
The Journal of social psychology, 2018
Individuals have a need to maintain positive social interactions, and with the advent of new-media technologies, there are a myriad ways individuals can satisfy this need by engaging socially in mediated (non-face-to-face) communication, hence the need for a special issue on "Relationships in the Digital Age." The articles in this special issue reflect the need to answer theoretical questions brought forth by the increased tendency for individuals to create and maintain interpersonal relationships through mediated forms of communication. The commentary highlights the need for increased research on mediated interpersonal relationships by psychologists and discusses how the articles in the issue can be used to answer theoretical questions about mediated interpersonal communication. The article ends with speculation on how media may create social spaces that may be advantageous for some individuals.
Pure Relationality as a Sociological Theory of Communication
Frontiers in Sociology
In order to explain the success of populist politicians use of social media, we need to subtract the social from relationality and separate social relationships from network theory applications. A pure theory of relationality is suggested by Werner Heisenberg's breakthrough in quantum mechanics. It is argued that sociology, to its detriment, has failed to incorporate a theory of communication, one adequate to the explosion of social media and the recent rise of populist politics, here instanced by Donald Trump. Realizing the underlying importance of communication technology in all social relationships, and treating these two aspects in a complementary fashion, is the purpose of this essay in sociological theory.
This special issue of Networking Knowledge -Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN seeks to explore how interpersonal relationships are mediated in contemporary contexts. Digital technologies and the practices associated with them enable us to interact with our social network of support in seemingly easy ways: we just need to use the touch of a finger on a mobile phone screen to show that we care. It does, however, also take only the same effort and the same fingertips to enact hate. Acts of disaffection, often crystallized as revenge, originate, in nests and corners of intimacy (Bachelard 1958, p.XXXVII), and when disseminated widely can be fatal 1 . Recently, acts of disaffection, or rather hate, -especially against diffuse, imagined collectives such as "the refugees" -have also appeared in the more public realms of forums, comments sections of online news, or social media feeds. A perception of anonymity might result in 'disinhibition effects' (Suler 2004) and sometimes quite extreme forms of hate speech (Gelber & McNamara 2016), which poses new challenges for media education and online governance 2 .
In Susan Drucker and Gary Gumpert, (Eds.), Heroes in a Global World, Hampton Press, 2008, 99-128.
In this chapter, Meyrowitz analyzes the new sense of intimacy with strangers that has been created by those modern media that simulate the sights and sounds of real-life interactions. This sense of intimacy, drives the attachment to “media friends”—those celebrities, actors, newscasters, politicians, talk show hosts, singers, sports figures, and so on, who become part of an extended network of social ties. Meyrowitz explains how new technologies reduce the distance between us and our media friends, blurring our response to their skills and talents with our response to their personalities. He suggests that the “unreal” relationships with media friends are, ironically, often deeper and longer-lasting than many real-life ties. He then explores these “intimate” relationships to the point of loss and shows how new forms of grief have been developed to cope with the death of media friends.
According to Luhmann's lesson, love is not a sentiment but a code which has rules through which it is possible to express or deny feelings. To outline the new features it becomes relevant to take into consideration the way the web has changed our being together, so if internet cannot be separated from our daily activities or let's say it is integrated with them (Wellman and Haythornthwaite 2002) if it has modified our way of being together and the relationships in which individuals get involved and live, one may then ask how it has changed the conception of love and its semantics. Besides sites to find a partner are already widespread and well used. What does love become in these social networking sites? How is it lived? To answer these research questions we took as a sample 400 profiles of users subscribing to dating sites. These were 200 men and 200 women between the ages of 18 and 45. VIRTUAL TOGETHERNESS BUT ALONE Wellman and Haythornthwaite in the text Internet in everyday life (2002) outline the implications of Internet now having entered in the context of everyday life. If the earlier studies looked at the difference between virtual and real these now (online and offline) the work of these two authors is based instead on the analysis of human experience conceived as a continuum of the merging of activities lived on the screen and not. It is based on the idea that Internet cannot be separated from everyday activities, but moreover it nowadays is integrated with them. This embedded with internet represents the present moment in which it is possible to consider it an instrument collocated in people's lives, in their relationships with their friends, in the sphere of affections, social, working and daily life. A domestication, or an appropriation of the medial technologies into family context. To comprehend the significance of such changes we first look at the idea of Simmel's notion of social circles (1903) before we carry on to Wellman and Horthornthwaite's ideas. We will try to study the structure of social media having as centre community relations. The step from communities to network is obviously not only due to technology and did not take place overnight but was a long process which according to Wellman (2001) grew from the traditional door to door to the type place to place which were made possible by means of transport and urbanization. In the reconstruction of this evolution an important step is the connection which become more and more personalized, person to person then from role to role in which one's attention is taken towards the role one covers in social places which are always more complex. It is possible to see a transformation in how to handle social relationships, that if in the traditional communities they happened among themselves, now due to the transformations mentioned above it is a role delegated to the single individual. According to Wellman (1996) three types
Politically Relevant Intimacy: A Conceptual and Empirical Investigation
International Journal of Communication, 2016
The trends of media personalization and intimization, alongside the growing recognition of the intricate relationship between the private and public spheres, raise complex questions about the ways in which politicians’ private lives are linked to the political realm. This article develops the term politically relevant intimacy, referring to texts in which matters of the public sphere are being tied to the discourse surrounding politicians’ personal lives. We identify two major types of political relevance—issue based and conduct based—and apply this framework to a comparative analysis of mediated manifestations of politicians’ intimate lives in Israel and the United States. Differences in level and type of politically relevant intimacy are found between news coverage and Facebook posts, as well as between the two countries. No significant differences are found between female and male politicians. We discuss implications for future research and for the citizenry in democracies.
Who Moved my Conversation? Instant Messaging, Intertextuality and New Regimes of Intimacy and Truth
The article investigates the shift of much interpersonal communication from phone or face-to-face interaction to Instant Messaging, especially among teenagers. This objectification of conversation enabled changes in myriad social practices, as well as in regimes of intimacy and truth: New, invisible audiences are introduced to hitherto intimate situations for real-time consultations; intimacy, traditionally based on exclusivity in access to events and information, has to be reshaped under the new conditions as “network intimacy”; formerly separate events collapse into new frames, challenging traditional temporal sequencing of sociability; conversations are imbued with performativities of different sorts; and proof and evidence are introduced into interpersonal sphere where they weren't common before.