Techno-Social Experiences of Privacy and Intimacy in College Culture

Abstract

This work considers the contemporary intersections of intimacy, technology, and privacy among college students in the US. This article outlines a framework for shifting social meanings and theorizes some potential implications. This project includes data from two primary field sites, a private university in the northeast and a public college in the southeast. I used a combination of face-to-face interviews and online ethnographic data collection methods for this project. Findings from this study indicate that while the concepts of intimacy and privacy remain fundamentally important to participants, the definitions of such concepts and their relationship with one another are being changed by communication technologies. Increasingly, young adults are defining privacy as the experience of managing their digital identity and understanding intimacy as being potentially disconnected from shared exchanges of private information. However, these ideas are in transition, and still deeply contested by participants.