This article addresses how gray data, or research data that have their provenance in the gray area between found texts and the products of participants, is complicated by issues inherent to studying the “alt-right,” especially in social justice–oriented and digital methods work. Although ethical guidelines and recommendations have not reached a consensus on issues such as requiring consent for doing work on gray data in general, fruitful contextual discussions that take in differing worldviews and political goals can help triangulate an approach to making decisions for specific projects. Furthermore, the overt hostility of “alt-right” groups to researchers is also considered as a complicating factor, one that extends the meaning of “ethical responsibility” to also include responsibilities to additional parties, such as those you are citing, research assistants, and family members. The article concludes with a consideration of the intimate proximities created by social justice–oriented and digital methods research on the “alt-right,” and a set of guiding questions for doing such work that, while not quite a set of best practices, are offered as signposts to help researchers navigate what are ultimately highly singular and emergent ethical problematics.
IntroductionThis chapter discusses the recent literature 1 on open non-monogamies, or non-monogamous arrangements that are known about by, at the very least, all the involved intimate partners. (This specifically excludes a consideration of the growing parallel literature on secret non-monogamies (e.g. infidelity, adultery, and cheating) addressed in relation to monogamy and marriage in Ziegler, Conley, Moors, Matsick, & Rubin, Monogamy, this volume.)This growing field comprises work on polyamory (discursively ethical or consensual non-monogamy); on polygamy (plural marriage, usually -but not exclusively -polygynous: Muslim, Christian, and other); on swinging (sometimes known as The Lifestyle, a subculture devoted to casual open sex); and on non-monogamies outside these three major formulations. This last category includes open marriages and relationships; alternative marital arrangements, sometimes referred to as swapping 2 or co-marital sex; friends with benefits; group sex (e.g. threesomes, orgies); open-sex commune experiments (e.g. the Oneida intentional community); and otherwise-unnamed non-monogamous intimate practices such as those that can occur in some lesbian, gay, bisexual, and kink subcultures. Finally, it also includes work that considers nonmonogamies broadly across these categories. These practices have different histories, etymologies, facets, and politics. Some of these practices are thousands of years old, some are merely decades old and some are just being fleshed out; some have their origins in religion or spirituality, others in a staunch and iconoclastic secularism. Taken together, however, they form a present and undeniable facet of contemporary intimacy that has been growing in prominence and significance in the public sphere and public culture since at least the early 1990s (Rambukkana, 2015). Engaging with open non-monogamies is no longer something relegated to societal margins in the life of Western societies; it has shifted to be a part of the centre -albeit a part that sits somewhat uneasily 236
The last decade has seen rise in technologies that allow humans to send and receive intimate touch across long distances. Drawing together platform studies, digital intimacy studies, phenomenology of touch, and ethics of technology, we argue that these new haptic communication devices require specific ethical consideration of consent. The paper describes several technologies, including Kiiroo teledildonics, the Kissenger, the Apple Watch, and Hey Bracelet, highlighting how the sense of touch is used in marketing to evoke a feeling of connection within the digital sphere. We then discuss the ambiguity of skin-to-skin touch and how it is further complicated in digital touch by remediation through platforms, companies, developers, manufacturers, cloud storage sites, the collection and use of data, research, satellites, and the internet. Lastly, we raise concerns about how consent of data collection and physical consent between users will be determined, draw on examples in virtual reality and sex-robotics, and ultimately arguing for further interdisciplinary research into this area.
To speak of “digital intimacies” is to acknowledge two premises, both foundational to communication studies. The first is that media of communication not only significantly affect the content of communication, but also are themselves meaningful. The second is that media of communication become articulated to the processes they interact with. Applying the first premise here posits that digital intimacies have a character of their own, due to their digital nature and its corollaries: coding, technologies (both ephemeral at the software layer, and concretized or embodied), platforms, design, networks, algorithms, etc. The digital in this figuring encompasses everything from programming to software communities, from individual to world-spanning networks, from microprocessors to robots. And every aspect of this digital nature leaves traces and transformed intimacies in its wake. Applying the second premise posits that digital intimacies have become, in addition to a particular subtype of intimacy, also a particular subtype of communication, and one that needs to be studied in its own right. Conjoining the concepts, thus, means that while the digital has transformed practices of intimacy, intimacies have equally infected the digital, guiding and inflecting its growth and spread at a fundamental level. Intimacy can mean many things (and the specific Genealogy of the Concept of “digital intimacies” is broken down in the following section), but for the purposes of a general gloss, intimacy can be taken to mean closeness, proximity, interconnectedness, connection. Digital intimacies can mean phenomena as narrow as fandom subreddits and as broad as international news publics. It means both the digital mediation of intimate matters such as sexuality and kinship, as well as topics one might not consider intimacies per se, but are nonetheless about kinds of interconnectedness, such as thinking through the costs/benefits of online voting platforms for democracy, or the surveillance issues inherent to using smart passports for border control. It is simultaneously broad and narrow, expansive and focused. It has interests in the past, present, and possible futures—even in fictions, and the new configurations and contortions that intimacies can be imagined into in (among others) science and speculative fictions. The study of digital intimacies, separately and—increasingly, radically—together, both opens up an exciting vein for new scholarship and creates opportunities to revisit older work that can be reclaimed and considered as part of this frame. An emergent field, it is significant to—in addition to communication studies—many other fields including cultural studies, sexuality studies, women’s and gender studies, Internet studies, game studies, platform studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and political science. Note: While a small number of the works and chapters in this bibliography address digital intimacies outside the Global North/West, this (in conjunction with a paucity of sources not originally in English) should be seen as a limitation of the bibliography as currently constituted and an area for future expansion of this entry.
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