Reparatively reading postdigital publics
Channel: Postdigital Intimacies
Date: 15/05/2021

Amy Dobson, Lecturer in Digital and Social Media at Curtin University, Australia.

Participation in social media communication and self-representation has become near-imperative for many people, especially youth. This was so before global “lockdowns” began and is certainly more so now. There is increasing public awareness of, and concern about, the design features, app interfaces, and platform algorithms aimed at keeping platform users engaged and active for as long as possible. Yet, vernacular discourses about social media participation are still primarily framed in terms of human agency -- the individual choices and responsibilities of users, especially young people, and along gendered, raced. For socially marginalised youth in particular, connection via social media is often framed in terms of promises of empowerment and self-expression, if not social capital and direct social mobility (Dobson, Carah, & Robards, 2018). Sociologist Eva Illouz suggests that late-modern societies are characterised by the prevalence of therapeutic discourses for understanding the self and subjectivity, and thus an ability to narrate the self “transparently” and to perform “authentically” is seen as key to personal happiness (Illouz, 2007), personal “empowerment”, and to one’s value.

Postdigital cultures chime nicely with such understandings of subjectivity. Unsurprisingly, the ability to represent a self “authentically” online is now seen as key to monestising social media (Abidin). In thinking about what is important in conceptualising intimacy in a “postdigital” world, I highlight the need to understand social media participation and self-representation beyond simplistic notions of human agency and choice; to conceptualise public-private sharing and “oversharing”, as well as limited self-disclosure and non-participation, as structured by existing social axes of inequality, as well as by non-human agents. I consider the kind of “reparative reading” (following Sedgwick, 2003; Wiegman, 2014) of everyday social media participation that might be ethically mandated in the current context, particularly of more “provocative” and contentious self-representations. In such intensely pressured, socially-striated and digitally collapsed contexts, constituted by a complex assemblage of human and non-human actants, an ethics of “queer comradery and generosity” is vital (Warner, 1999). In short, we need to practice love, not judgement, when trying to understand and analyse contentious youth digital representations and cultures.



Amy Shields Dobson is a Lecturer in Digital and Social Media at Curtin University. Her work focuses on youth, social media, and gendered subjectivities. She is the author of Postfeminist Digital Cultures (2015), and editor of Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media (2018) with Brady Robards & Nicholas Carah, both published by Palgrave. Over the last decade her work has advanced knowledge about youth social media use by highlighting the complexity of digital self-representation and the co-constitution of youth self-representational practices, and commercial digital media and platform imperatives. Her recent projects include research into cyber-safety and sexting education, female genital cosmetic surgery, and youth nightlife cultures and alcohol branding on social media.