Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and other non-heterosexual and gender diverse (LGBTIQ+) young people utilise a range of digital media platforms to explore identity, find support and manage boundaries. Less well understood, however, is how they navigate risk and rewards across the different social media platforms that are part of their everyday lives. In this study, we draw on the concept of affordances, as well as recent work on curation, to examine 23 in-depth interviews with LGBTIQ+ young people about their uses of social media. Our findings show how the affordances of platforms used by LGBTIQ+ young people, and the contexts of their engagement, situate and inform a typology of uses. These practices – focused on finding, building and fostering support – draw on young people’s social media literacies, where their affective experiences range from feelings of safety, security and control, to fear, disappointment and anger. These practices also work to manage boundaries between what is ‘for them’ (family, work colleagues, friends) and ‘not for them’. This work allowed our participants to mitigate risk, and circumnavigate normative platform policies and norms, contributing to queer-world building beyond the self. In doing so, we argue that young people’s social media curation strategies contribute to their health and well-being.

This article explores the potential role of sustained social media use in longitudinal qualitative research. We introduce the research design and methodology of a research project exploring sustained use (five or more years) of the social network site Facebook among young people in their twenties. By focusing on this group, we seek to uncover how 'growing up' stories are told and archived online, and how disclosure practices (what people say and share on social media) change over time. We question how we can understand the 'digital trace' inscribed through the Facebook Timeline as a longitudinal narrative text. We argue that 'scrolling back' through Facebook with participants as 'co-analysts' of their own digital traces can add to the qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) tradition. QLR and the scroll back method attend to a similar set of concerns around change over time, the depth of inquiry, and uncovering rigorous, rich life narratives. We explore limitations (especially around intentionality) and ethical challenges, while also arguing for the inclusion of these often highly personal, deep, co-constructed digital texts in qualitative longitudinal research.We also consider how the scroll back method could apply to other digital media, as the sites and applications that people user diversifies and changes over time.

We usually think about intimacy as to do with our private, personal lives, as describing feelings and relationships that are most inner, most 'inward to one's personhood' (McGlotten, 2013, p. 1), and concerned with relationships that are most important to us. Sociologists have theorised intimacy as centrally involving mutual self-disclosure (Giddens, 1992), time spent in co-presence, physical affection, and acts of practical care (Jameison, 2011). But, as queer theory and sexuality studies tell us, intimacy is very much socially sanctioned, defined by institutions, laws, and normative social pressures (Berlant, 1998; Plummer, 2003). The sociology of intimacy helps illuminate what, specifically and empirically, is involved in the doing of intimacy in different places and cultures, and for different genders, classes, and social groups. Queer and feminist critical cultural theorists like Berlant have explained how, in late-modern cultures, having a 'life' has become equated with having an intimate life (Berlant, 1998, p. 282). Further, as Cefai and Couldry note, 'What queer theory has taught us is that heteronormativity shapes what can appear to us as "intimate" even in settings where questions of sexual identity are typically not articulated as such' (2017, p. 2). Understandings of intimacy are culturally and socially specific, rather than 'global' or 'universal' (Jameison, 2011). However, in many places right now intimacy names 'the affective encounters with others that often matter most' (McGlotten, 2013, p. 1). From the perspective of poststructuralist queer and feminist theory, producing intimacy can be understood as part of subjectification processes that centrally involve the hierarchical ordering of relationships and psychic concerns, in socially legible ways, in order to make sense of ourselves and those around us. How social media figures in such processes of psychically and materially ordering relationships and shaping what appears as intimate is part of what we consider in this collection. In this chapter, and this collection more broadly, we are interested in how social media practices challenge and disrupt, as well as how they reinforce and concretise (hetero)normative notions of intimacy as a concept that creates boundaries around certain relationships and ethics of care. Social media are now centrally involved in processes whereby pedagogies of intimate life as life itself are learnt, reproduced, given value, contested, and exploited.

Tinder is a location-based smartphone application used by young adults. Advertised as a popular and unique way to forge connections, Tinder’s introduction into intimate life is indicative of increased information and communication technology (ICT) usage within this sphere. While the impact of ICT use within intimate life has been debated, little sociological research has investigated Tinder within this context. This article draws on data from a small scale exploratory study, including surveys (n = 203) and interviews (n = 10), examining the use of Tinder by young Australians (aged 18 to 30) and how use contributes to intimate outcomes. While survey results provide insight regarding engagement with Tinder and its use in intimate life, two key themes – (1) Tinder’s use as an additional tool in intimate life and (2) its perceived impact on ‘connection quality’ – demonstrate Tinder’s role in intimate outcomes. Findings support Jurgenson’s depiction of today’s societies as ones characterised by augmented reality rather than digital dualism.

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