Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork among young adults in Norway, this paper examines how social media may provoke movements that challenge boundaries between public/private spheres and contributes change in sociality. I contrast the material with Gullestad’s pre-social media work on the themes from the 1980s.

Paper long abstract:

Following Gullestad’s work from Norway in the late 1970s and 1980s, neighborhoods symbolize public affairs and flowing relations, while homes with their curtains and doorsteps symbolize the private. Such symbolic thresholds still play their roles as markers between public and private spheres today. However, this paper explores to what extent current uses of social media are challenging these thresholds, as well as the kitchen table society described by Gullestad.

During two years of fieldwork among young adults in Norway, I observed how conversations and presence around their “kitchen tables” are altered by endless information beeping in on their phones. In the paper’s ethnographic case, we are partying with four young women and learn about how their conversations are driven by Snapchat’s Snapmap function – where friends can share their location - and how they themselves become the conversation objects of others. Snapchat is a mobile messaging application that also offers an interactive map (Snapmap). At the night of the party, the young women are pinned on Snapmap, and suddenly receive two knocks on their door. The first knock triggered the next, and as the last knocker enters the scene he bursts out “What are THEY doing here?” This vignette illuminates how Snapmap challenges the privacy of the home, and how social media in general changes the conversations around the table. Snapmap has its own curtains and thresholds, similar to Gullestad’s kitchen table, though different than the physical house with its markers of privacy standing publicly as part of the neighborhood.