Flashing Your Phone: Sexting and the Remediation of Teen Sexuality

Abstract

This essay offers an account of “sexting's” cultural value and social uses by examining celebrities' production and distribution of sexual imagery on Twitter. It argues that as a result of technological convergence and the prevalence of social media, teens and celebrities are using “candid” images of their sexuality to remediate themselves in a fashion that generates a specific form of user-generated capital. Ultimately, this perspective is used to argue that the anxiety surrounding high school-age sexters has less to do with teens documenting their sexuality than it does with the ways that new forms of text-based media articulate the libidinal status of teenage sexuality in contemporary culture.

Keywords:

• Celebrity
• Convergence
• Remediation
• Sexting
• Social Media
• Texting
• Twitter
• User-Generated Content

Notes

According to The Daily Mail (2007), the hoax resulted in thousands of Facebook® friends.

The first camera phone, the keitai, was manufactured in Japan by Kyocera in 1999 and was soon followed by Sharp's® SH-04, which was the first cellular phone to be equipped with a camera (Goggins, 2006, p. 144).

For an overview of the history and debates surrounding text messaging, see Glotz and Bertsch (2005) and Harper, Palen, and Taylor (2005).

Since the first text message was sent in 1993 (Agar, 2003), the communicative opportunities created by texting have not only made it a preferred means of correspondence for young people, the unique quality of those opportunities (e.g., the seeming discretion with someone may comport the most private aspects of their lives) has, as Goggins (2006) noted, placed it at the center of various celebrity sex scandals (p. 133). Laine's (2010) essay about texting's role in Finnish sex scandals provides one such example.

Kutcher's acumen for exploiting the interest surrounding celebrities' private lives was first made evident in his popular MTV program Punk'd in which he televised the reactions of his celebrity friends caught in untenable situations, like being intoxicated at a drunk-driving checkpoint. This kind of Candid Camera-type format, what McCarthy (2004) identified as second-wave reality TV, serves as another example of a general trend toward the collapsing of the distinction between celebrities and non-celebrities.

For example, see the work of advertising critic Jean Kilbourne (1999).

The repressive hypothesis argues that the prohibition and management of sexual representations have installed, to use Foucault's (1990) words, “an apparatus for producing an ever greater quantity of discourse about sex, capable of functioning and taking effect in its very economy” (p. 23). In this scenario, power is conceived of a productive force that creates a myriad of effects.

For Freud (1991), the drive (trieb) embodies a homeostatic pulsation of energy that eliminates tension. Trieb is one of two German words for “instinct.” The use of trieb, instead of instinkt connotes undifferentiated movement. Consequently, for Freud, the drive's most notable feature is its general exertion of pressure toward an undefined object (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973, p. 214).

Building on Freud's discussion of the splitting of the ego, Lacan (1977) suggested that the experience of subjectivity is always one predicated on the self-alienation that results from the signifier's splitting of consciousness and unconsciousness. Lacan (1998) argued that the drive's homeostatic function hinges on a privileged object (the objet a) that is charged with the task of enabling the individual to cope with the profound lack that is the result of the primal split (or cut) through misplaced desire.

For a detailed analysis of this operation, see Krips's (1999) discussion of the Fort-Da game in Fetish: An Erotics of Culture.

In other words, because pleasure is found in the pursuit of a phantasmic goal, the individual must construct a rationale that allows it to enjoy the process of a fruitless endeavor. Žižek (1997) described this as follows: “[F]antasy is the very screen that separates desire from the drive: it tells the story which allows the subject to (mis)perceive the void around which the drive circulates as the primordial loss constitutive of the drive” (p. 32).

Žižek (1997) described this as the central factor underpinning ideological identification's efficacy: “[I]deological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human being beneath it” (p. 21).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hugh Curnutt

Hugh Curnutt (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh, 2008) is an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University.