This book explores emergent intimate practices in social media cultures. It examines new digital intimacies as they are constituted, lived, and commodified via social media platforms. The study of social media practices has come to offer unique insights into questions about what happens to power dynamics when intimate practices are made public, about intimacy as public and political, and as defined by cultural politics and pedagogies, institutions, technologies, and geographies. This book forges new pathways in the scholarship of digital cultures by fusing queer and feminist accounts of intimate publics with critical scholarship on digital identities and everyday social media practices. The collection brings together a diverse range of carefully selected, cutting-edge case studies and groundbreaking theoretical work on topics such as selfies, oversharing, hook-up apps, sexting, Gamergate, death and grief online, and transnational family life. The book is divided into three parts: ¿Shaping Intimacy¿, ¿Public Bodies¿, and ¿Negotiating Intimacy¿. Overarching themes include identity politics, memory, platform economics, work and labour, and everyday media practices.

A timely, cutting edge collection bringing together scholars from across digital culture

Introduction.- PART 1: SHAPING INTIMACY.- Digital Intimate Publics & Social Media: towards theorising public lives on private platforms.- Publicising privacy, weaponising publicity: The dialectic of online abuse on social media.- Software Intimacies: Social Media and the Unbearability of Death.- Snapshots of Afterlife: The cultural intimacies of posthumous camera phone practices.- Remembering through Facebook: Mediated memory and intimate digital traces.- Sexting, Intimate and Sexual Media Practices, and Social Justice.- PART 2: PUBLIC BODIES.- Digital Masculine Disruptions: Intimate Webcam Forums and the Challenge to Heterosexual Normativities.- "This dapper hotty is working that tweed look": Extending Workplace Affects on TubeCrush.- Effervescence, resonance and emotive practice on social media: Public expressions of heartbreak among young Filipino Twitter users.- 'We're all gonna make it brah': Homosocial relations, vulnerability and intimacy in an online bodybuilding community.- 'It's nice to see you're not the only one with kinks': Presenting Intimate Privates in Intimate Publics on Tumblr.- Between firefighting and flaming: collective and personal Trans* and gender-diverse Social Media.- PART 3: NEGOTIATING INTIMACY.- "There are literally no rules when it comes to these things": ethical practice and the use of dating/hook-up apps.- Speaking to the Other: Digital Intimate Publics and Gamergate.- Ambivalent Intimacies: Entangled Pains and Gains Through Facebook Use in Transnational Family Life.- Oversharing is the norm.- Archives of Sadness: sharing bereavement and generating emotional exchange between strangers on YouTube.