Social Media and Personal Relationships: Online Intimacies and Networked Friendship (Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life)

This book explores the diverse ways people engage with social media to build, maintain and display personal networks. Despite the remarkable technological possibilities for global networking, most people's online connections are personal, localized or stem from previous local connections. Yet this study also shows how social media are used to generate new modes of self presentation, interaction, and etiquette. Deborah Chambers develops a theory of mediated intimacies to understand how digital communication coincides with new intimacies and meanings of 'friendship' as features of a networked society. The book combines sociological debates about intimacy, family and friendship with media studies of computer mediated communication. How social media transforms personal life is investigated through five broad themes of social media engagement: the presentation of online self; teenage friendships; home, families and new media; digital dating; virtual community and online social capital. The author explains how social media technology contributes to a dramatic reconfiguration of our ideas about intimacy and friendship.