Dr Melissa Gregg

Research Area/Interests:

Online social networking

Online Intimacy: Public and private life in a network society

Summary: This project aims to focus public debate about the use of new media technologies to consider how people are leading lives that are always in a sense “online” and immanently tied to network structures and logics. It offers detailed explanation of the features and benefits of online intimacy to contextualise privacy panics over new media. It also relates the changing nature of privacy to broader social and economic conditions, given that participation in online communities is symptomatic of the labour practices emerging in the network society. The project will culminate in a book co-authored with Dr Catherine Driscoll (USyd).

Description: This research offers first-hand knowledge of the new forms of mediated intimacy and friendship taking place online. It explains how these networks provide forms of support and community responsive to the changing nature of everyday life in information societies. If young people’s online behaviour is often considered intrusive and exceeding the bounds of normal privacy, the broadcast impulse behind weblogs and new ambient technologies is taken to be narcissistic. Websites like Flickr, Twitter and Radar allow constant message and/or photo feeds to reveal one’s current location, marking the banal minutiae of everyday life for anyone to see. But rather than seeing participation in online communities as evidence of dysfunction—of an inability to communicate “offline” in “the real world”—this research investigates how online intimacy may act as a recompense for the intrusion of public-sphere demands on traditional leisure time, the widespread expectation of computer literacy among young people and the long hours culture of middle-class professionals engaged in computer-mediated information jobs. The extent to which people choose to conduct significant parts of their personal lives online—from finding the next book they should read to finding a life partner—says something about the opportunities available for previous forms of leisured activity and perhaps their reliability in providing satisfying relationships.

The project’s novelty is to combine this embedded approach with a theoretical framework that situates the use of new media technologies within wider social and economic changes. Most clearly, this methodology demonstrates the overlap between the forms of friendship performed and valued in online communities and the forms of subjectivity that seem destined to flourish in the workplaces of the information economy.

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