ECREA16-Abstract

205

Thursday, November 10

1 1 : 0 0 – 1 2 : 3 0

DCC03

NewMedias New Intimacies

M. Nebeling Petersen

University of Southern Denmark, Department for the Study of Culture, Odense M, Denmark

This panel asks how different intimacies are done and produced online, and how social medias and digital technologies enable new intimacies. The organi‑

zation of intimate relations continuously changes in relation to media and communication technology, globalization, and late-modernity (Kuntsman and

Karatzogianni 2012; Berlant 2000; Giddens 1992; Plummer 2003), resulting in new understandings and formations of intimacies. New media technologies

allow people to connect – and to represent their intimate relations – in newways (Ben-Zeev 2004; Kang 2012).The panel challenges contemporary popular

concerns, e.g. that increasing use of computer-mediated communication decrease or stand in the way of intimacy and social contact. Rather the panel takes

seriously the forms of intimacy and social change that are thriving thanks to digital media. Characterized as they are by user-generated content, interac‑

tivity, participation, connectivity, and community formation, new social media are bridging physical and cultural distances in an increasingly transnational

society. They also provide new paradigms for understanding what it means to be intimate with another person, with technologies, and with oneself. Doing

intimacy through, in, and by social media technologies brings a new urgency to perennial questions about authenticity and presence in relation to our use

of digital media. These questions are discussed and analyzed in five different papers, each bringing the intersection of intimacy and online technologies to

the front: The two first papers turn to Facebook as sites of newways of doing and creating life and death: The first paper investigates how death and mourn‑

ing have become integrated into and imbricated with digital media as users share the death of a close relative on Facebook, while the second paper inves‑

tigates how social media sites facilitate new kinds of kinship, as parents of children conceived with anonymous donor-sperm finds genetic-related siblings

and their parents in Facebook groups. The last three papers turns to posthumanist feminist theory to understand how technology and body are intimately

interwoven, and asks how technologies enable and extend the body and its

capacities:The

third paper asks how social media facilitate newways of creating

disability awareness-raising, and how access to the internet and social media platforms can be seen as ways of increasing mobility for people living with

disabilities. The fourth paper investigates the bodily and intimate feelings of really being pregnant, how pregnancy materialize online, by analyzing online

communities and blogs written by gay men, who are pregnant through a surrogate abroad. The last paper theorizes digital intimacy. By looking closer at

technological failure, e.g. when the technology doesn’t follow or when it lags our commands, the paper pays attention to the materiality of our bodies, as

our intimate interlacing with the machine is momentarily interrupted. Thus this panel presents a range of case studies that explore how social media en‑

ables and/or produces new (and old) intimacies and new relations, as well as how practices and understandings of intimacy are both embedded in digitally

mediated communication and generate innovative uses or forms of new media.

PN 068

“Oh, Now He Talks About His Dead Child Again!” Exploring the Role of Emotional Self-Management When Using Facebook to Express

and Cope with the Death of a Close Relative

T. Raun

Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark

Death and mourning have become integrated into and imbricated with digital media (Lagerkvist 2013: 15). This has given rise to an evolving body of re‑

search, arguing that online peer grief support groups, memorialized profiles and R.I.P. sites enable commemorative communities of mourning and remem‑

brance, that function as therapeutic resources (e.g. Frost 2014, Kern et al. 2013, Segerstad & Kasperowski 2014, Christensen & Sandvik 2013, Marwick &

Ellison 2012, DeGroot 2014). However, as only few of these studies include interviews there is still a “scant understanding in media studies of what these

new cultures of memory mean for people existentially” (Lagerkvist 2013: 10). This paper turns to the existential dimension by exploring a group of Dan‑

ish people’s motives for and experiences with using their personal Facebook profile to cope with the death of a close relative, based on semi-structured

interviews, postings and comments. The main focus is on the question of emotional self-management, which came up repeatedly during the interviews.

Drawing on theories of social media, the cultural history of death and mourning, and dialogical research the paper poses and expands on the following

conclusions: Deciding what to post and when is an ongoing impression management that unfolds as a self-reflexive dialogue with multiple internal and

external others. In this self-reflexive dialogue the figure of the oversharing social media user resurfaces again and again as a phantom figure, constituting

a boundary that the interviewees constantly position themselves in opposition to but which they also continuously are in danger of becoming as they share

their emotions and experiences of bereavement online. References Christensen, D. R., & Sandvik, K. (2013).“Sharing death: Conceptions of time at a Danish

online memorial site”, in Taming time, timing death: Social technologies and ritual (ed. Christensen, D. R. andWillerslev, R.), 99–119. DeGroot, J. M. (2014).

“’For Whom the Bell Tolls’: Emotional Rubbernecking in Facebook Memorial Groups”, in Death studies, 38(2), 79–84. Frost, M. (2014).“The Grief Grapevine:

Facebook Memorial Pages and Adolescent Bereavement”, in Australian Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 24(02), 256–265. Kern, R., Forman, A. E., &

Gil-Egui, G. (2013).“RIP: Remain in perpetuity. Facebook memorial pages”, in Telematics and Informatics, 30(1), 2–10. Lagerkvist, A. (2013).“New Memory

Cultures and Death: Existential Security in the Digital Memory Ecology”, in Thanatos, 2(2), 1–17. Marwick, A., & Ellison, N. B. (2012). “’There Isn't Wifi in

Heaven!’NegotiatingVisibility on Facebook Memorial Pages”, in Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56(3), 378–400. Segerstad,Y., and Kasperowski,

D. (2014).“A community for grieving: affordances of social media for support of bereaved parents”, in New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 1–17.