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| == ⭐ intro (what is this text about) == | | == ⭐ intro (what is this text about) == |
| | ''Yet the autobiographical isn’t the personal. […]All sorts of narratives are read as autobiographies of collective experience. The personal is the general. Publics presume intimacy (Berlant, 2008).'' |
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| Digital lifelines of shared vulnerability.
| | == ⭐ chapter 1 = Online Intimate Publics == |
| | Intimate publics were originally defined by Berlant as embodied spaces, even if built of strangers and centred around media and culture. To reimagine them in a body-less, digital space we first must understand their original conception. |
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| | Generally, intimate publics are scenes where personal, self, and political aspects are turned into commodities. These spaces can serve as arenas for pedagogical discourse, addressing normativity and normative intimate desires across diverse subject groups. Intimate publics function as settings that promise and deliver sentiments of belonging and solace. In simpler terms, they create an "experience of belonging" and encompass a mix of comfort, affirmation, guidance, and conversations about living a certain way (2008, p. viii). |
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| | For the scope of my thesis I am interested in how these dynamics of intimacy and publicness are being performed on a web-based infrastructure. When intimate publics are online they become radical, disruptive performances of togetherness. My claim does not go against the public construction of these virtual publics as ‘failed intimacies that disrupt the flow of a good life lived right, that is, a life that involves coupling and kids, or at least, coupling and consumption’ (McGlotten, 2013, p. 7). Instead I wish to lean into this dichotomy of "real" versus "virtual" intimacy as a means to imagine more fluid forms of connection and belonging. Forms that exist outside normative relational construction and behind, above and underneath institutions, states, nations, and the ideal of publicness (Berlant 1998, p. 284). |
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| | This becomes especially interesting when you start to look into who makes up these intimate publics online. In spaces of digression from normative society, closeness, vulnerability and understanding seem to grow parallel to anonymity. Diverse groups of individuals that deviate from the norm navigate through intimate publics to foster forms of insider acknowledgment and cultural self-growth. Despite or perhaps due to their devaluation by mainstream society, marginalised people create a sense of social belonging near the technologies that turn the physical world into a place of emotional investment and identification. They create online intimacies of the unbearable. |
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| ''- what happens to our sense of self when different identities cannot coexist inside us?''
| | == ⭐ chapter 2 = Online Intimacies of the Unbearable == |
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| ''- how do marginalised people find community and what are these communities like?''
| | == ⭐chapter 3 = Unbearable Intimacy == |
| | | == ⭐ conclusion == |
| ''- what can this way of using the internet tell us?''
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| Through these questions it will explore the relationship between marginalised individuals and online community, focusing on how these individuals find identity and belonging in virtual spaces. To do this, I will share people's stories of fragmentation, healing and support. The stories are backed and intermezzo-ed by theories about these people, places and moments written by social scientists, physiologists and theologians. It is a honest, guttural and soft portrayal of an online people.
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| == ⭐ key issue 1 = chapter 1 == | |
| fragmentation of the self as a result of trauma and marginalisation
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| * ''what happens to our sense of self when our identities cannot coexist?''
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| When trauma occurs you dissociate. Your personality splits when trauma happens, a wounded part and a part that has to deal with it. Fragmentation of personality causes trauma to stay with you. Seeing the experience, experiencing it as an adult with compassions supports your wounded part and heals.
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| Fragmentation and compartmentalisation of mind and body in traumatised clients, self-alienation. Trauma-related disorders are not disorders of event but of body, brain and nervous system. Biological adaptation how individuals adapt to caretakers who are both protectors and danger.
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| Internally fragmented, paradox. Surviving the unsurvivable, reconciling opposites. Survivors of abuse, neglect and other traumatic experiences feel better because of compartmentalisation. Contradictions of true and false self cause pain. Over time, self-alienation can only be maintained by most individuals at the cost of increasingly greater self-loathing, disconnection from emotion, addictive or self-destructive behaviour, and internal struggles between vulnerability and control, love and hate, closeness and distance, shame and pride. Hurt, lost and lonely parts experiencing love, self-compassion for each part, a balance of parts (Fisher, 2017).
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| Alienation from the self and from others. Alienation sees both a negative sense of otherness and feelings going from rage to depression. It’s a subtraction, a withdrawal and distance. Again, a fragmentation. One manages the inconvenience of the world by creating distance from within. It’s an inside-out loss. If your relations to those around you were truly over and failed, you would need no distance. One only needs defence against something or someone who is still present (Berlant, 2022, p.26).
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| == ⭐ key issue 2 = chapter 2 ==
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| online communities as safe space to manage identities that are outside the norm
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| * ''how do alienated people find community and what are these communities like?''
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| Online communities can give people a space to link their fragmented selves, explore and manage identities. Socially marginalised groups find in online communities a safe space to manage identities that are outside the norm. By building a community, you embed it into your daily life. Sources of social support and identity construction give marginalised people a space to understand and create the self. It’s interactive, archived and anonymised. I can use the online to manage an offline body. Deviant identities and bodies form disembodied communities. Goffman (1986) talked of “back places” as places where one does not need to conceal the source of deviance from the norm. By being witnessed you allow the self to be affirmed for the first time. Membership to a group of peers gives an antidote to the cultural dislocation. Communities provide management of a certain self and do harm-minimisation. You may challenge your marginalised status, manage inconvenient identities and receive sympathy without the risk of exposing yourself to parties who may not be sympathetic (Smith, 2013).
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| The immaterial cyber world is a dimension that is both “out there” and “in here”, both public and private, of the self and the other (Adler & Adler, 2008). Confused and believing oneself to be alone people seek help on the web. People find a community that can finally accept the shadows of your fragmented self, but the mirror shows scary images. One can find identity in community, the dispossessed finds a reservoir of hiding places to form your own culture, even if still influences by normative standards. Your relationships become the narratives you construct (idem).
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| The internet as a tool influenced by your social capital, intended as economic resources, mutual support, shared language and norms, social trust and a sense of mutual obligation. Disadvantaged groups use it to broader their social networks whilst advantaged groups use it to reinforce existing ties. If you lack social capital it’s thus likely that you use computer mediated communication to make up for it. Communicating with new people introduces access, information and opportunity into a network that had none (Gonzales, 2015). If you do have social capital already, you want to strengthen bonds. If you have little or none, it’s a necessity to seek for.
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| People in virtual communities do just about everything people do in “real life” but we leave our bodies behind (Rheingold, 1993).
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| == ⭐ key issue 3 = chapter 3 == | |
| * Sacramental web: a new vision of the role of the internet
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| * ''what does this way of using the internet tell us?''
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| Formulating a view of the internet as a place where people can find fulfilment, help and wholeness requires a re-analysis of what it is as a space. So far, we have seen conceptualisations of the web that distinguish it into four mindsets. The internet as an ''information space'', an utilitarian tool to transfer data; the internet as a ''common mental geography'' or a mechanism to construct shared worldviews; an ''identity workshop'' or a place to learn and test new ways of being and a ''social space'' or a space to make connections with others. Summarised, it becomes a common space for constructing identity, pursuing information and meaning.
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| A new view sees a broader attitude towards it, identifying the internet as a sacramental and spiritual space. A sacred, holy space that has been set apart to assist in a human search for meaning significance. Online activities exist in this model as a part of one’s spiritual life guided by needs that can be for identity, community or information. In the immaterial and timeless, spiritual pilgrims form techno religion.
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| There are three main view of the interaction between spirit and technology. Machine-God, Electronic Creation and Sacramental Cyberspace. The first one is a search for a higher power within technology, a use of the internet as spiritual in itself. Techno-paganism falls into this, as does pro-modernist thought and progress fetishisation. Electronic Creation sees technology as a necessary tool for consciousness to evolved, a tool for harmony. Lastly, Sacramental Cyberspace sees the internet as a digital replication of physical religion (Campbell, 2005).
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| This thesis borrows heavily from the second category to build a third overarching view. As disenfranchised and alienated people turn to the internet for their search of a sense of community and well-being, the internet becomes transcendent. Technology and the internet are an extension of spirit, a tool to experience a reality beyond the solid. A moment without a body, a place without time. Religion-online and online-religion are but expressions of a search to name the invisible and intangible. It is absolutely not in the business of establishing the moral connotation of the internet or discuss its right to exist. It is here, we may not go back. What can it be? How can it help?
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| The connection between community and spirituality is itself the connection between the individual and the collective. The well-being of the individual is intertwined with the well-being of the community.
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| Spirituality is the inner sense of self we use to define who are. It is based on experiences of divine dimensions of reality and doesn’t rely on any special location or person to facilitate these moments (Pruyser, 1968). It’s a relationship between the individual, the collective and the universe. We experiences these sacred dimensions outside of institution, only through our own bodies, nature as a whole and technology.
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| Religion is one of the many ways through which spirituality can find expression. An institution based in faith through which practice becomes tradition. It necessitates a division and polarisation of the natural from the super and shrouds the divine in mysticism. Spirituality is, at its core, fairly simple. It’s a conscious interconnectedness where the divine could be in everything and life is but an expression of a network of unity (connects to bridle network of the more-than-human) (Chile, 2004). It’s trust, a search for meaning and purpose, a sense of connection and a transcendence of the self that results in inner peace and well-being. It requires a relationship with something greater than the self and an holistic wholeness (Delgado, 2005).
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| Technological determinism reconceptualises machines and organisms as coded texts that we can use to write and read our reality. Haraway talks about a boundary between physical and non-physical that is blurry and indistinct. These dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilised are all in question. Home, the workplace, public arenas and even the body itself can all be dispersed and interfaced in infinite ways. Communication science has been translating the world into a problem of coding. The solution to key questions is a theory of language and control. It sees a world divided. By boundaries where information sits neatly as a quantifiable emergent. Social connections are seen as a network with hubs and edges, classifiable. The idea of a universal theory is a mistake that misses most of lived reality. We must take responsibility for technology by reconstructing boundaries to connect with other and with all of our parts. Escape dualism, rebuild and destroy machines, identities and categories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess (Haraway, ?)
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| == ⭐ conclusion ==
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| The project, how can this inform the production of a community platform?
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| | == ⭐ references == |
| Adler, P.A. and Adler, P. (2008) ‘The Cyber Worlds of self-injurers: Deviant communities, relationships, and selves’, ''Symbolic Interaction'', 31(1), pp. 33–56. doi:10.1525/si.2008.31.1.33. | | Adler, P.A. and Adler, P. (2008) ‘The Cyber Worlds of self-injurers: Deviant communities, relationships, and selves’, ''Symbolic Interaction'', 31(1), pp. 33–56. doi:10.1525/si.2008.31.1.33. |
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| Berlant, L.G. (2022) ''On the inconvenience of other people''. Durham: Duke University Press.
| | Andreassen, R. (2017) ‘New Kinships, new family formations and negotiations of intimacy via Social Media Sites’, ''Journal of Gender Studies'', 26(3), pp. 361–371. doi:10.1080/09589236.2017.1287683. |
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| Bridle, J. (2023) ''Ways of being: animals, plants, machines: the search for a planetary intelligence''. New York: Picador.
| | Berlant, L.G. (2008) ''The female complaint the unfinished business of sentimentality in American culture''. Durham: Duke University Press. |
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| Campbell, H. (2005) ‘Considering spiritual dimensions within computer-mediated communication studies’, ''New Media & Society'', 7(1), pp. 110–134. doi:10.1177/1461444805049147.
| | Lagerkvist, A. and Andersson, Y. (2017) ‘The grand interruption: Death online and mediated lifelines of shared vulnerability’, ''Feminist Media Studies'', 17(4), pp. 550–564. doi:10.1080/14680777.2017.1326554. |
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| Chile, L.M. (2004) ‘Spirituality and community development: Exploring the link between the individual and the collective’, ''Community Development Journal'', 39(4), pp. 318–331. doi:10.1093/cdj/bsh029.
| | Mesch, G.S. (2011) ‘Minority status and the use of computer-mediated communication’, ''Communication Research'', 39(3), pp. 317–337. doi:10.1177/0093650211398865. |
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| Delgado, C. (2005) ‘A discussion of the concept of spirituality’, ''Nursing Science Quarterly'', 18(2), pp. 157–162. doi:10.1177/0894318405274828.
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| Fisher, J. (2017) ''Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors: Overcoming internal self-alienation''. New York, New York: Routledge.
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| Gonzales, A.L. (2015) ‘Disadvantaged minorities’ use of the internet to expand their social networks’, ''Communication Research'', 44(4), pp. 467–486. doi:10.1177/0093650214565925.
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| Haraway, D. (1985) ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, ''Socialist Review (US)'', pp. 209–240. doi:10.4324/9780203093917-25.
| | Schwartz, A. (2020) ‘Soft femme theory: Femme internet aesthetics and the politics of “softness”’, ''Social Media + Society'', 6(4), p. 205630512097836. doi:10.1177/2056305120978366. |
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| The Government Lab (2020) ''The power of virtual communities'', ''The GovLab''. Available at: <nowiki>https://virtual-communities.thegovlab.org/</nowiki> (Accessed: 28 September 2023).
| | Shields Dobson, A., Robards, B. and Carah, N. (2019) ''Digital Intimate Publics and social media''. Palgrave Macmillian (Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change). |
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| Mesch, G.S. (2011) ‘Minority status and the use of computer-mediated communication’, ''Communication Research'', 39(3), pp. 317–337. doi:10.1177/0093650211398865.
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| Smith, N., Wickes, R. and Underwood, M. (2013) ‘Managing a marginalised identity in pro-anorexia and fat acceptance cybercommunities’, ''Journal of Sociology'', 51(4), pp. 950–967. doi:10.1177/1440783313486220. | | Smith, N., Wickes, R. and Underwood, M. (2013) ‘Managing a marginalised identity in pro-anorexia and fat acceptance cybercommunities’, ''Journal of Sociology'', 51(4), pp. 950–967. doi:10.1177/1440783313486220. |
// home
⭐ intro (what is this text about)
Yet the autobiographical isn’t the personal. […]All sorts of narratives are read as autobiographies of collective experience. The personal is the general. Publics presume intimacy (Berlant, 2008).
⭐ chapter 1 = Online Intimate Publics
Intimate publics were originally defined by Berlant as embodied spaces, even if built of strangers and centred around media and culture. To reimagine them in a body-less, digital space we first must understand their original conception.
Generally, intimate publics are scenes where personal, self, and political aspects are turned into commodities. These spaces can serve as arenas for pedagogical discourse, addressing normativity and normative intimate desires across diverse subject groups. Intimate publics function as settings that promise and deliver sentiments of belonging and solace. In simpler terms, they create an "experience of belonging" and encompass a mix of comfort, affirmation, guidance, and conversations about living a certain way (2008, p. viii).
For the scope of my thesis I am interested in how these dynamics of intimacy and publicness are being performed on a web-based infrastructure. When intimate publics are online they become radical, disruptive performances of togetherness. My claim does not go against the public construction of these virtual publics as ‘failed intimacies that disrupt the flow of a good life lived right, that is, a life that involves coupling and kids, or at least, coupling and consumption’ (McGlotten, 2013, p. 7). Instead I wish to lean into this dichotomy of "real" versus "virtual" intimacy as a means to imagine more fluid forms of connection and belonging. Forms that exist outside normative relational construction and behind, above and underneath institutions, states, nations, and the ideal of publicness (Berlant 1998, p. 284).
This becomes especially interesting when you start to look into who makes up these intimate publics online. In spaces of digression from normative society, closeness, vulnerability and understanding seem to grow parallel to anonymity. Diverse groups of individuals that deviate from the norm navigate through intimate publics to foster forms of insider acknowledgment and cultural self-growth. Despite or perhaps due to their devaluation by mainstream society, marginalised people create a sense of social belonging near the technologies that turn the physical world into a place of emotional investment and identification. They create online intimacies of the unbearable.
⭐ chapter 2 = Online Intimacies of the Unbearable
⭐chapter 3 = Unbearable Intimacy
⭐ conclusion
⭐ references
Adler, P.A. and Adler, P. (2008) ‘The Cyber Worlds of self-injurers: Deviant communities, relationships, and selves’, Symbolic Interaction, 31(1), pp. 33–56. doi:10.1525/si.2008.31.1.33.
Andreassen, R. (2017) ‘New Kinships, new family formations and negotiations of intimacy via Social Media Sites’, Journal of Gender Studies, 26(3), pp. 361–371. doi:10.1080/09589236.2017.1287683.
Berlant, L.G. (2008) The female complaint the unfinished business of sentimentality in American culture. Durham: Duke University Press.
Lagerkvist, A. and Andersson, Y. (2017) ‘The grand interruption: Death online and mediated lifelines of shared vulnerability’, Feminist Media Studies, 17(4), pp. 550–564. doi:10.1080/14680777.2017.1326554.
Mesch, G.S. (2011) ‘Minority status and the use of computer-mediated communication’, Communication Research, 39(3), pp. 317–337. doi:10.1177/0093650211398865.
Schwartz, A. (2020) ‘Soft femme theory: Femme internet aesthetics and the politics of “softness”’, Social Media + Society, 6(4), p. 205630512097836. doi:10.1177/2056305120978366.
Shields Dobson, A., Robards, B. and Carah, N. (2019) Digital Intimate Publics and social media. Palgrave Macmillian (Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change).
Smith, N., Wickes, R. and Underwood, M. (2013) ‘Managing a marginalised identity in pro-anorexia and fat acceptance cybercommunities’, Journal of Sociology, 51(4), pp. 950–967. doi:10.1177/1440783313486220.
