Being naked on the internet: young people’s selfies as intimate edgework

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I examine how young selfie sharers engage in intimate edgework in the visual social media site tumblr. Originally devised by Stephen Lyng, edgework is defined as the purposeful engagement in risky behaviour as a result of the seductive character of the experience, and the rewards of doing so brings. The article is based on data gathered from in-depth, online interviews with 25 young people who post naked self-photographs to their tumblr blogs, and participant observation between mid-2014 and late 2015. Through their online practices, I show how young selfie sharers gain a range of benefits similar to those leveraged by people engaged in archetypal forms of edgework – such as skydivers – without the threat of physical danger. Young people negotiate the societal boundaries of morality/immorality and order/disorder; prepare and deploy specific skills in their edgework; and maintain a perception of control. Through being naked on the internet, young people feel a sense of well-being and belonging, thus engaging in ‘intimate edgework’. This article answers the call for further development of a feminist model of edgework that uproots its original hegemonic masculine ideals by elaborating on how individuals negotiate emotional edges in the digital age.

KEYWORDS:

• Edgework
• tumblr
• youth culture
• selfies
• risk

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre, Greg Noble, Amanda Third, and Paulina Billett for their support. I would also like to thank the participants in this research for their valuable time and insights.

Notes

1 www.tumblr.com/about

2 An acronym for ‘Gratuitous Picture of Yourself’.

3 In which dozens of female celebrities had private nude images hacked from the Cloud and distributed online.