Digital Sociology

Critical Perspectives

K. Orton-Johnson,N. Prior

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137297792
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

Sociology and our sociological imaginations are having to confront new digital landscapes spanning mediated social relationships, practices and social structures. This volume assesses the substantive challenges faced by the discipline as it critically reassesses its position in the digital age.

Part I

Relationships

1

Personal Relationships, Intimacy and the Self in a Mediated and Global Digital Age

Lynn Jamieson

Introduction

Few would disagree with Roger Silverstone that the near global exposure of almost all individuals to various forms of mass media content invisibly informs and constrains much social action and belief (Silverstone, 1994: 133). There is less agreement about the precise nature of the impact, particularly in the domain of personal life. The concern of this chapter is digitally mediated forms of communication and intimacy in personal relationships. My work in the 1990s sought to untangle contradictory claims about social change, selfhood and the quality of personal relationships, reconnecting theory with empirical evidence. The optimists in debate then, exemplified by Anthony Giddens, saw personal relationships as becoming more intense and democratically collaborative projects as people sought to anchor themselves through intimacy in rapidly changing worlds. For the pessimists, then exemplified by Zygmunt Bauman and Ulrich Beck, the same forces of rapid change were corrosive of personal relationships and rendered intimacy insipid, vapid and unworkably fragile. Exaggeratedly optimistic and pessimistic postures also haunt discussions of digital technologies and everyday personal lives, similarly implicating theories of selfhood and social change.

When Intimacy: Personal Relationships in Modern Societies was first published, a review complained that topics of cybersex and computer-mediated communication had been omitted. The reviewer elaborated on the missed opportunity; the book should have addressed both popular speculations, such as ‘the potential decline of skin against skin sex and the extension of the body into new dimensions’, and the accumulation of new evidence about the impact of the Internet on personal life. The reviewer noted by way of example, ‘already data suggests cyber-dating has the potential to minimise the risk of emotional harm for young women’ (Stevenson, 1999: 849). A simultaneous lament over silence on queer theory, ‘gender trouble’ and postmodern theorising perhaps also suggested how the reviewer saw the appropriate theoretical tools for the analysis of computer-mediated communication. At the time, although interested in these theoretical currents, I had a curmudgeonly disinclination to take dramatic speculations about cybersex seriously. I also judged the body of evidence detailing the impact of computer-mediated communication on personal relationships as rather thin, both in general and with respect to the particular example about cyber dating. I might also have argued that the implied issues around gender, sexuality, identity, embodiment and trust were certainly and extensively addressed throughout the book, along with the relationship between discourse and everyday practice, as an aspect of my theme of intimacy. Fundamentally, though, the reviewer was right; more specific theoretical questions about the part played by digital-age technologies in the transformations of personal relationships, intimacy and the self should have been explicitly addressed. It is easier to do this now than in 1998 because there is a more substantial body of relevant empirical data to help provide answers (Valentine, 2006).

Debates about intimacy articulate with much wider theoretical and historical concerns: understandings of subjectivity and ‘the self’ and of the nature of social change. In the first section, I make the case that the classical interactionist accounts of the self, with some refurbishment, can remain fit for theoretical purpose in a digital age, despite seeming to take face-to-face personal relationships for granted as ontological necessities. I also address the apparently better fit between a ‘network society’ and a theoretical emphasis on selves shaped by discourse rather than relationships. In the second section, I return to previous analysis of how people construct and sustain intimate relationships to reconsider co-present and digitally mediated interactions in terms of practices of intimacy (Jamieson, 2011). In the final sections, I look briefly at the empirical literature, firstly on relationships that are imagined and formed through digital means and secondly on the digital mediation of relationships which simultaneously have a face-to-face history.

Theorising the self in a digital age

Face-to-face interaction and personal relationships have a privileged place in various strands of psychology and in the ontology and epistemology of the traditions of symbolic interactionism (Mead, 1934) and phenomenology (Schutz, 1932); intense, face-to-face, sustained communicative interactions are productive of a sense of self with agency and autonomy, as well as of a sense of a normatively ordered social world in which the self is anchored. In Mead, it is the interaction with embodied others in childhood which produces an inner dialogue with a ‘generalised other’. The significance of physical and emotional interaction for the well-being of children and the significance of enduring ontological security are widely accepted within social science and are evidenced within psychology; people suffer long-term damage if their childhood lacks one or more loving relationships providing physical contact and attentive care. (Ontological security is used here to mean security of the sense of self and confidence in the continuity of one’s being-in-the-world. The term was most famously first used in sociology by Giddens (1984), who drew on the fields of psychiatry and psychoanalytic psychology, particularly Erikson (1963) and Sullivan (1955). It was a key concept for Laing (1960), and also briefly cited by Giddens, whose sociological contribution was recently reappraised by Scott and Thorpe (2006).) Many contemporary social scientists writing about either subjectivity or personal life or both continue to draw on psychoanalytic psychology, symbolic interactionism and phenomenology, albeit eclectically and not exclusively. Over the decades, their basic insights have been elaborated or supplemented by other approaches more attentive to issues of gender, power and inequality. Proximate, sustained, emotionally charged relationships with co-resident or frequently co-present family and friends continue to loom large theoretically in some strands of contemporary theorising as the most ‘significant others’ shaping a sense of self, particularly in childhood, with other voices relegated to the background chorus (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). If personal relationships are increasingly digitally mediated, is it simply assumptions of co-presence that need to be modified or does this indicate the need to theoretically uncouple self-formation and face-to-face personal relationships?

The theoretical significance of face-to-face interpersonal relationships for shaping selves and social worlds was already called into question by some deployments of the work of Michel Foucault that were grounded in an analysis of the historical period since the Enlightenment, significantly predating the digital revolution. Although the hands-on activities of parents managing children do feature in Foucault’s descriptions of the social production of self-disciplined bodies (Foucault, 1978), the aspect of his theorisation which had particular impact is his characterisation of the power of discourse to shape selves, particularly discourse as mediated, disembodied expert knowledge, a theme taken up by Nicholas Rose (Rose, 1996). Rose leads a genre of theorising in which mediated discourse, not interpersonal relationships, powerfully shapes selves, and which, therefore, has no need to itemise a distinction between an inner circle of intimate ‘significant others’ and the ‘background chorus’. Users of this genre also typically gloss over the distinction between the processes creating the apparatus of a sense of self in early childhood and the business of being ourselves in adulthood.

Writing at the same time as Rose, Manuel Castells linked the rise of the Internet with a pattern of forming relationships that Barry Wellman subsequently dubbed as ‘networked individualism’ (Wellman et al., 2006). Castells defined ‘individualism’ in terms of self-directed (rather than tradition-directed) projects and relationships, noting, ‘it finds in the Internet the proper technology for its expression and its organization’ (2002: xxx–xxxi). The term ‘networked individualism’ suggests a historical shift in emphasis from long-term loyalties to family, friends and place-based communities to more fluid and dispersed social networks. The implied automatic opposition between loyalties of a more relationally embedded nature and a particular form of ‘individualism’ is an old manoeuvre which is open to challenge theoretically and empirically (Jamieson, 1987, 2005). Neither Castells nor Wellman are as radical as Rose in their theoretical declarations concerning the irrelevance of face-to-face personal relationships but they make it clear that the Web has helped shift the focus of individual and social development away from strong to weak ties (Granovetter, 1973). Wellman’s focus on networks takes little account of how sufficient ontological security is acquired to equip people for the active networking necessary for people ‘to thrive or even to survive comfortably’ as no group, neighbourhood or household can be relied on for ‘taking care of things for them’ (Wellman et al., 2006: 164–165).

Foucault’s vision of the shaping of selves through self-censoring performance chimed with feminist accounts of the social construction of gender and sexuality, albeit these were written in theoretical traditions emphasising interaction in face-to-face intimate relationships as key sites of socialisation rather than orientation to mediated discourse. A different emphasis on the fluidity of selves, identities and performance emerged in the philosophical work of Judith Butler (1990), with little acknowledgement of such interactionist traditions. Donna Haraway, informed by the sociology of scientific knowledge, coupled radical fluidity of selfhood and technological developments in her selfdeclaration as a cyborg and in her advocacy of using the affordances of technologies for feminist performance (Haraway, 1997; Wajcman, 2004). Intimate face-to-face relationships become of little theoretical relevance in this strand of writing about selves, and their salience in lived experience remains out of focus since attention has shifted to the technically enhanced and mediated.

There are many theorists occupying the middle ground between these positions, acknowledging the power of mediated discourse in framing multiple and fluid identities without denying the significance of face-to-face intimate relationships for ontological security. It is possible to acknowledge a debt to symbolic interactionism or phenomenology and attend to the power of discourse. Diverse examples include the social psychologist Peter Hewitt (2007) and the feminist author Dorothy Smith (1987). Defenders of the interactionist tradition note that it need not be read as at odds with the emphasis on the fluidity of selves. A sense of self as both fluid and fragmented can be found in the work of Mead: ‘For Mead and the majority of those following in this tradition, there are “all sorts of different selves answering to all sorts of different social reactions” (Mead, 1962: 142; Holmes, 2010: 145)’. This is consistent with the writing of the interactionists Berger and Luckmann (1966) on mediated discourse forming part of the ‘background chorus’ that plays a supporting role in the sustaining of a sense of self, perhaps including a revitalising of the ‘generalised other’ (Holdsworth and Morgan, 2007). This fits in with the genre of media studies, exemplified by Morley’s (1986) analysis of television (TV) and domestic leisure, which acknowledges the significance of personal relationships for how people tune into, hear and interpret mediated discourse. However, if disembodied mediated discourse joins the ‘background chorus’, then it may enter into how all parties imagine, plan and enact their relationships. Nevertheless, ‘significant others’, in the form of personal embodied relationships, continue to play the main part. In a digital age, however, how ‘significant others’ play their part will include mediated communication as well as co-present interaction.

Theorising intimacy in a digital age

Anthony Giddens used the term ‘the pure relationship’ (1990, 1991, 1992) to describe relationships based on what I call ‘disclosing intimacy’, a dialectic of mutual self-disclosure, a sharing of inner thoughts and feelings. Giddens used the term ‘pure’ because the sustainability of the relationship relies only on participants’ willingness to continue because of their mutual pleasure therein. The elements of the definition do not, in themselves, privilege the physical co-presence of face-to-face relationships. In essence, it is an intimacy of the self rather than the body, although it might be enhanced by bodily intimacy. It is theoretically possible for the practice of self-disclosure to occur online, mediated by digital technology, either generating a fleeting sense of intimacy between hitherto strangers or developing the intimacy of an already established relationship that began with co-presence. When online relationships between initial strangers are sustained over long periods of time, they often start to approximate friendship developed ‘offline’ (Chan and Cheng, 2004), but such convergence often involves adopting additional means of communication beyond the initial digital context (Baym, 2010). Research indicates that mutual disclosure of personal troubles in online environments established for this purpose do provide emotional support (Miyata, 2002). However, as I have argued using research evidence about the everyday lives of friends, lovers, couples, families and kin (Jamieson, 1998, 1999, 2005), ‘the pure relationship’ lives more strongly in talk about relationships than in relationships as they are lived. In relationships as they are lived, mutual disclosure is not the only way of establishing intimacy and may not always be a sufficient way to sustain an intimate relationship. Moreover, while distance relationships can be meaningful intimate relationships, co-presence is a more integral component of some ways in which people generate intimacy than ‘disclosing intimacy’, for example, spending time together, providing care through practical acts and demonstrating affection physically.

A particular form of co-presence that is a practice of intimacy in itself is choosing to spend time together to enjoy the pleasure of co-presence. Being together can both express and enable intimacy. Prioritising time, offering privileged access to time and seeking ‘quality time’ are all ways of expressing intimacy. A sense of intimacy can also grow stronger through time together and the fact of co-presence can facilitate further practices of intimacy, such as disclosing intimacy or practical acts of care. The research literature reveals instances in which couples claim love, shared knowledge and deep mutual understanding, despite also noting that they have little need for talk and say very little to each other. Such couples communicate in looks and body language, shared daily routines and practical acts of care. The depth of empathy and affection some couples achieve through physical co-presence with few words seems unlikely to be reproduced ‘silently’ in disembodied virtual co-presence drawing on the repertoire of online gestures and gifts such as ‘poke’, ‘share the love’ or the many ‘send a . . . ’ options offered by social networking sites and associated simulation games. Developing the use of emoticons, such as the smiley faces developed for text messages, may add emotional nuance and depth among skilled text and email practitioners (Barker, 2007) but they seem unlikely to do much on their own. These digital gestures still seem limited compared with the opportunities for developing a sense of deeply knowing each other that arise for the taciturn who live sympathetically and attentively side by side. Spending time together digitally may parallel the building of a relationship through co-present spending time together to a degree but is unlikely to generate intimacy without disclosure through modes of interaction involving talk, such as chat rooms, email and Internet telephony.

Across a number of types of relationships, intimacy can be built and sustained through practical actions of caring for, giving to or sharing with others. It is possible to orchestrate practical acts of caring for somebody as well as expressions of caring about them online. For example, Parreñas (2005) describes Filipino mothers overseas providing economically and emotionally for their young adult children back home by putting funds in co-managed bank accounts, making routine phone calls, sending regular text messages and parcels of everyday necessary items and gifts. The literature on transnational families also provides examples of people orchestrating care for elderly relatives from a distance. But distance relationships clearly have a restricted potential ...