Beyond the Screen: Love in a Time of Social Media (original) (raw)
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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
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Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2016
In Iran, social media platforms have become powerful tools for political and interpersonal communication. They open new ways for their users, particularly women, to negotiate their intimate relationships with their family, (potential) partners or friends. Intimacy online is usually achieved through reciprocal visual and textual self-disclosure, which in turn may lead to face-to-face encounters. For Muslim Iranian women, social media allows room for self-expression, a way to combat loneliness and create meaningful relationships with like-minded people. However, at the same time, women are confronted by a number of risks associated with social media interaction in Iran, such as censorship, online (sexual) harassment, or cybercrime. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observation with Muslim Iranian women in Tehran, this paper explores the extent to which social media platforms (blogs, Facebook and dating sites) have created both challenges and opportunities for them by transf...
It must be love" THE roLE oF MEDIA In THE ConSTruCTIon oF THE "roMAnTIC LovE" C onCEPT 1
2014
The intimate feeling we call love can be perceived as a product of social construction processes and therefore as a timeand culture-dependent concept. This perception can be exemplified by the extensive changes the concept of love has undergone in different periods of history – starting with Plato’s “Eros” theory, through the courtship love of the middle ages, and all the way to the research of love in the 20th century (e.g. Singer, 2009; Sternberg, 1998). Consequently, we can say that romantic love is an idea whose meaning and boundaries we internalize through a process of socialization that teaches us which values, beliefs, thinking patterns and behaviors are accepted in the society we live in. In addition, as in the current generation media are dominant agents of socialization which accompany us from infancy to adulthood, it is interesting to examine the role they play in shaping their audiences’ romantic consciousness. Contemporary culture provides us with many differing symbols...
Digital romance: the sources of online love in the Muslim world
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