Postdigital Intimacies and the Networked Public-Private

Digital culture has become inextricable from all forms of intimate social and personal life, to the point of being imperceptible. This creates a number of global challenges, not least in how we make sense of ourselves, how it effects health and wellbeing, how we learn about digital culture, and how we navigate the risks, challenges to security and the prevailing inequalities of such a context. Examples include the monitoring and measuring of bodily functions like menstruation or pregnancy, people sharing details of intimate relationships on social media, and the intimate relationships we develop with artificial assistant technology in our homes.

This network proposes the novel concept of a 'postdigital intimacy' as a starting point for making sense of the collapsing of public and private worlds through multiple digital networks. We propose that this concept provides an important way of addressing gaps in knowledge around the reshaping of the public and private, providing an underlying concept upon which academics can create new accounts that have the capacity to shape important societal issues. The network will provide the context in which to inquire into five interrelated themes, each of which will be addressed in a symposia event. These themes are:

1. Failed Intimacies, looking at how we live and make sense of ourselves in hostile digital environments (e.g. trolling) when such hostility feels deeply personal, and what strategies people use to defend themselves and others;
2. Visual Ethics/Networked Selves, investigating how visual-digital culture has become a normal part of how we relate to ourselves and others (e.g. selfies), and the new ethical dilemmas that emerge from these practices;
3. Influential Net-Works, examining how media influencers and digital corporations shape our personal beliefs, consumption and ideals, and conversely how the internet shapes what we see (e.g. search engines);
4. (Post)digital Data and Relationships, exploring how we create and share information and how this shapes our 'real-life' relationships and complicates notions of privacy and security;
5. Public/Private Art, Activism, Archavism, assessing how artists, cultural producers and practitioners have represented and creatively responded to the ways public and private worlds have become intertwined.

A further contribution addressed by the network concerns how we as academics produce knowledge about postdigital intimacies that can then inform wider societal and public understandings and shape interventions. In response, the network's symposia draw on contributions from world-leading international scholars, who have an outstanding reputation for working with different stakeholders and user-groups and have also initiated exciting new methodological approaches for studying intimacy. The network will harness this expertise and seed new ideas and research through training early career researchers, who are the next generation of knowledge producers. Thus, the network represents a future-oriented interjection, priming that next generation of researchers with the skills and techniques to make a difference.

By attending to these gaps, the network will be an important contribution to the field, as well as addressing issues of significant interest to wider public discussions and private concerns.

There are two groups whom this project aims to benefit:

1) The wider beneficiaries include government, educational institutions (schools, universities), and artists, activists and NGOs, both nationally and internationally, who can rely on the knowledge of researchers within the network who speak to socially and culturally significant issues. As one example, recent reports have included the UNESCOs "I'd blush if I could", which covered the gendering of new AI technology that reproduce gendered stereotypes, for example in feminised voice assistants (see also art and activist group Feminist Internet https://feministinternet.com/projects/, for similar observations and creative responses). The network addresses these culturally significant concerns, which include; the challenges of widening social divides, inequality, and political extremism, especially as they relate to gender; ethical issues that arise from sharing private lives in public, for example in concerns about mental health; how the digital industry shape tastes, values and belief systems; information concerns, for example in how big data and high tech informs personal, familial, and other relationships; and, in concerns of how cultural producers (artists, activists and archivists) respond to changes in digital culture. (See case for support for how these relate to symposia).

The network will make use of the considerable stakeholder groups of symposia speakers. Where possible, the network team will look to linking stakeholder, network participant and symposia speakers together, for example in the formation of new research projects at network meetings. Likewise, speaker's collective stakeholder groups will be able to make use of the network website, allowing them to gain access to cutting-edge knowledge. The website will be promoted through a number of channels including social media and email. (See symposia participants in the case for support for more details of various stakeholders).

2) A further beneficiary of the network will be PhD and ECRs, who will be trained in producing research with impact. This is enabled in the project through workshops/mentoring slots at the symposia and downloadable recommendations that will be available on the network website. In training the next generation of researchers, the project will ensure that future research will be undertaken with a view to impacting on societal and cultural challenges. Furthermore, through such training, it is likely that PhDs will gain valuable insight into career opportunities beyond the academy, which in turn will be of benefit to government, educational institutions (schools, universities), and artists, activists and NGOs. The training of PhD and ECRs has the added benefit of ensuring the longevity of the network and its research agendas. Concurrently, these new researchers will gain valuable experiences, with clear benefits to their own academic career progression in a research sector that is increasingly and importantly recognising measurable impact (e.g. through the REF) and/or outside of the academy.