| Abstract |
Digital culture has become inextricable from all forms of intimate social and personal life, to the point of being imperceptible. This creates a number of global challenges, not least in how we make sense of ourselves, how it effects health and wellbeing, how we learn about digital culture, and how we navigate the risks, challenges to security and the prevailing inequalities of such a context. Examples include the monitoring and measuring of bodily functions like menstruation or pregnancy, people sharing details of intimate relationships on social media, and the intimate relationships we develop with artificial assistant technology in our homes. This network proposes the novel concept of a 'postdigital intimacy' as a starting point for making sense of the collapsing of public and private worlds through multiple digital networks. We propose that this concept provides an important way of addressing gaps in knowledge around the reshaping of the public and private, providing an underlying concept upon which academics can create new accounts that have the capacity to shape important societal issues. The network will provide the context in which to inquire into five interrelated themes, each of which will be addressed in a symposia event. These themes are: 1. Failed Intimacies, looking at how we live and make sense of ourselves in hostile digital environments (e.g. trolling) when such hostility feels deeply personal, and what strategies people use to defend themselves and others; 2. Visual Ethics/Networked Selves, investigating how visual-digital culture has become a normal part of how we relate to ourselves and others (e.g. selfies), and the new ethical dilemmas that emerge from these practices; 3. Influential Net-Works, examining how media influencers and digital corporations shape our personal beliefs, consumption and ideals, and conversely how the internet shapes what we see (e.g. search engines); 4. (Post)digital Data and Relationships, exploring how we create and share information and how this shapes our 'real-life' relationships and complicates notions of privacy and security; 5. Public/Private Art, Activism, Archavism, assessing how artists, cultural producers and practitioners have represented and creatively responded to the ways public and private worlds have become intertwined. A further contribution addressed by the network concerns how we as academics produce knowledge about postdigital intimacies that can then inform wider societal and public understandings and shape interventions. In response, the network's symposia draw on contributions from world-leading international scholars, who have an outstanding reputation for working with different stakeholders and user-groups and have also initiated exciting new methodological approaches for studying intimacy. The network will harness this expertise and seed new ideas and research through training early career researchers, who are the next generation of knowledge producers. Thus, the network represents a future-oriented interjection, priming that next generation of researchers with the skills and techniques to make a difference. By attending to these gaps, the network will be an important contribution to the field, as well as addressing issues of significant interest to wider public discussions and private concerns. |
