Rethinking Intimacy: How the Use of Online Interpersonal Technologies has Reshaped College Students’ Relationships

• In Event: 2164 - Internet and Society: Connection and Integration

Abstract

This project considers the nature of contemporary perceptions and frameworks of meaning situated at the intersections of intimacy, technology and relationships among college students in the US. Participants in this study discuss how techno-social practices surrounding relationships are deeply connected with shifting meanings attached to the concept of intimacy. This work outlines a framework fragmented and shifting social meanings and theorizes some potential implications. This project includes data from two primary field sites, a private university in the northeast and public college in the southeast. I collected data on 52 participants, between the ages of 18 and 24. I used traditional face-to-face interviews as the primary data source and supplemented with online ethnographic data collection methods. Questions were open-ended and encouraged participants to tell their own stories and express their own meanings. Findings from this study indicate that while the concept of intimacy remains fundamentally important to participants, the nature of such concepts are shifting, and are often depending on the techno-social context in which the concept operations. I identify several complications in understanding the notion of intimacy and its relationships to other key concepts; specifically, romantic and sexual behavior, relationship formation and maintenance and the conceptual interactions between intimacy and privacy. I further address some of the shifting patterns of collective social experiences of intimacy, and the consequences of such experiences to the meanings attached to intimacy.

Author

• Alecea Ritter Standlee, Gettysburg College