The Intimacy of Strange Friends: On Public and Private Communication on Social Network Sites

• In Event: 338 - Section on Communication and Information Technologies Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 02.

Abstract

This paper addresses the notion that New Media create new forms of “public” communication by reconfiguring ideas about what it means to interact with “friends” or “strangers” on social network sites like Facebook and Gayromeo. We take issue with the traditional view that the dynamics of e.g. bourgeois publics tend to prefer arguments and the validity of (better) reasons. On the basis of an empirical ethnographic case study of the social network sites Facebook and the hook-up site Gayromeo it can be shown instead that the disorderly order of communication practices are produced by indeterminacy, vagueness and constant irritation. While the traditional theoretical framework of public communication and speech tend to limit public practices to the validity of better arguments and to the monolithic Reason (Habermas), this paper reconstructs empirically how communication in global social network sites can only operate within the mode of indefiniteness and disorder. Indeterminacy, from this point of view, is a solution for the problem to speak intimately in public and to an indefinite audience which is the normal case in global social network sites. With the help of interviews with couples that became “friends” on the hook-up site Gayromeo, we also want to stress how this disorderly dynamic is not only confined to online communication, but can transgress the borders of the internet, thereby influencing what it means to communicate as “friends” or as “strangers” and call into question clear-cut distinctions between public and private, “cool” public and “hot” intimate styles of communication.

Authors

• Elke Wagner, Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz

• Martin Stempfhuber, University of Hamburg

• Niklas Barth, University of Hamburg