Negotiating Digital Citizenship by Anthony McCosker Sonja Vivienne Amelia Johns

Author:Anthony McCosker,Sonja Vivienne,Amelia Johns [Anthony McCosker,Sonja Vivienne,Amelia Johns]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Book Network International
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Intimate Citizenship 3.0

Sonja Vivienne

In this chapter, I explore the good, the bad and the complicated of what I call Intimate Citizenship 3.0. These are constitutive digitally mediated practices that intersect across intimacy, privacy, publicness and difference. I use ‘3.0’ in alignment with Tim Berners-Lee’s evocation of the semantic web as ‘fractal’ (Berners-Lee and Kagal, 2008) and challenged by vastness, vagueness, uncertainty, inconsistency and deceit (Lukasiewicz and Straccia, 2008). These variables similarly invoke the uncertainty and inconsistency of navigating digitally amplified self-representation and civic participation. Ubiquitous engagement with technology, particularly social media, has made everyday maintenance of a congruent private/public identity increasingly complex. Digital technologies amplify what Bakhtin called polyphonic discourse, or multivocal speech that is ‘overlapping’ and ‘always unfinished’ (1970). There are currently endless communicative variables across textual genres (SMS, photos, blogs, status updates), spaces (home, work, public transport, f2f, numerous online platforms), publics (familiar, unknown) and time (revisiting past, present, anticipating future). boyd (2008) has dubbed this ‘social convergence’ or ‘context collapse’ whereby ‘persistent, replicable and searchable’ (boyd, 2008) dimensions, and digital ‘exhibitions of self’, overlay and intersect with embodied daily realities.

Digital Citizenship explicitly canvasses shifting understandings of inclusion/exclusion, private/public and negotiations of the intimate and personal in a way that previous understandings of traditional citizenship do not. The average teenager must negotiate their digital self-representations with many people—teachers, parents, friends, prospective employers, possible romantic interests—who are stakeholders in their daily life. I use ‘negotiate’ here because power resides in these processes, with adults and/or hegemonic structures and discourses positioned to lock down, censure and censor any representations that are deemed unsuitable for, or threatening to, homogeneity. One example of this is the moral panics that are routinely built around the dangers of ‘over sharing’ intimacies in online spaces, and the expectations placed upon guardians and parents to monitor and intervene in these practices. This has ramifications for marginalised and/or stigmatised identities (crossing intersections of race, class, faith, sexuality and gender) that can be simultaneously mundane and profound.

When Ken Plummer originally coined ‘Intimate Citizenship’ in 2003—to encapsulate the right to choose what we do with ‘our bodies, our feelings, our identities, our relationships, our genders, our eroticisms and our representations’—he could not have anticipated the complications invoked by ubiquitous use of technologies that bring disparate social spheres together. In acknowledgement of these complications, Intimate Citizenship 3.0 is a conceptual framework that defies out-of-date digital dualisms like ‘real life’ and ‘online’. It is a toolbox of pragmatic and contextual strategies that circumnavigate the strictures of stigmatised digital self-representation. Working with a cohort of people whom I call ‘everyday activists’—those who advocate for social change through routine embodied encounters with norms, rather than formal participation in social movements—I have observed and analysed exceptionally sophisticated navigation of the complex terrains of intimacy, identity and networked life (Vivienne, 2016). These inform the refinements I make to Plummer’s theoretical lens of ‘Intimate Citizenship.’

While I draw on previous work with queer and gender-diverse communities, it seems possible that their strategies—used to counter the high

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