{"id":16804,"date":"2013-09-04T17:26:21","date_gmt":"2013-09-04T21:26:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=16804"},"modified":"2013-09-04T17:29:59","modified_gmt":"2013-09-04T21:29:59","slug":"sextual-healing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2013\/09\/04\/sextual-healing\/","title":{"rendered":"Sextual Healing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

One of these days I\u2019ll find something to cite on the topic of Early Internet Adolescence that isn\u2019t my own experience, but here goes: I like to joke that the Internet and I went through puberty at about the same time. As a result, I spent my teenage years on the cusp of being what we now think of as \u201cconnected\u201d\u2014I journaled on paper<\/a> but wrote poetry on computers (also napkins); I wrote letter-length notes during class but sent email during my free periods<\/a>; in general, I communicated with friends and family (as well as myself) through an array of both analog and digital media. Though sometimes I hung out talking to strangers in AOL chat rooms (especially before I had friends who, like me, didn\u2019t have a curfew), my digitally mediated interactions were a lot like my telephone-mediated interactions in that they occurred primarily with people I already knew from in-person contexts.<\/p>\n

Digitally mediated interaction was new and exciting (especially to a shy kid<\/a> who already fancied herself a writer), but from the very beginning, it was just another piece of the life I was already living. It didn\u2019t make me a new or different person (in contrast, sometimes I felt more free to be myself via email), and nor did my friends interact with me through chat or email in ways that were incongruous with the ways they interacted with me in person. So what were those interactions like, especially as my friends and I tried to navigate the complicated social- and emotional politics of attraction in the context of a small high school? This was back in the pre-SMS era, mind you, so to hear\u00a0The Today Show\u2019s Matt Lauer tell it last month<\/a>, I should have been receiving graceful, articulate, hand-written notes from classmates who fancied me, and perhaps responding with notes of my own if the fledgling twitterpation was mutual.<\/p>\n

Oddly enough, this is not what I remember happening.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In fact, I don\u2019t even need to consult those old paper journals to remember that nearly everything about teenage courtship was f\u2019ing awkward,<\/i> both before and after we all got email at school and had a thrilling new way to flirt. (As I\u2019ve argued elsewhere<\/a>, I remain convinced that courtship and dating frequently just are<\/i> awkward, period stop, degree of digital mediation notwithstanding.) Similarly, while it may have been the Web 1.0 era, my teenage courtship experiences were definitely mediated: Even if we forget that physically mediated (or \u201cface-to-face\u201d) interaction is mediated (guess what: it\u2019s mediated!), getting into my first significant relationship was still a highly mediated process. The young man in question called to ask me out in lieu of saying something face-to-face (even though we worked closely together on our high school newspaper, and so saw each other anywhere from five to seven days a week), and that phone call itself was the culmination of a four-person game of telephone that took an entire Sunday afternoon (as two mutual friends spent hours calling each of us and then calling each other to compare notes, until the success of The Phone Call was certain enough for my soon-to-be boyfriend to pick up the phone). The technologically mediated interaction didn\u2019t stop once we became a couple, either: out of the particular obsessive hunger for each other\u2019s company that only teenagers can muster, we talked on the phone most nights and<\/i> sent long emails back and forth and<\/i> sometimes talked on AIM in addition to all of that, and we did so for almost a year. And it was still the 1990s.<\/p>\n

\"OMG<\/a>
OMG sexting hysteria<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Though some insist the plural of \u201canecdote\u201d is not \u201cdata,\u201d my adolescent experiences form just one more reason I remain convinced that\u2014if there are indeed large-scale differences between Teen Courtship Now and Teen Courtship Then\u2014these differences are not caused by<\/em> the advent of any particular form of digital mediation (email, SMS, social networking sites, etc.), and nor are they caused by any particular social practice enacted through digital media (e.g., \u201csexting<\/a>\u201d). Instead, in what should be a familiar move by now, I argue that neither digital social technology nor \u201csexting<\/a>\u201d has caused \u201chookup culture\u201d (which is itself a contentious and highly problematic framework), but rather that sexting makes a few larger, much more troubling phenomena more apparent. These phenomena include the following:<\/p>\n