588902

research-article2015

NMS0010.1177/1461444815588902new media & societyLambert

Article

Intimacy and social capital

on Facebook: Beyond the
psychological perspective

new media & society

1 17
The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1461444815588902
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Alex Lambert

Monash University, Australia

Abstract
Social capital has become a key concept in the study of social network sites such as
Facebook. An influential body of literature has emerged which links the accumulation
of social capital on Facebook to various psychological traits and depositions. There is a
need to augment this work with a more critical, qualitative approach which recognises
other key social and technological aspects of Facebook. Based on ethnographic research,
I explore how the exchange of social capital on Facebook is significantly influenced by
mobility, surveillance and norms of public intimacy. Facebook users must continually
negotiate intimacy when claiming on social capital, and this involves a nascent set of
social skills and digital literacies. I suggest the term intimacy capital to conceptualise the
way in which these skills are distributed unevenly in society, opening up a critical way of
thinking about social capital and intimacy on Facebook.
Keywords
Bourdieu, Facebook, friendship, intimacy, mobility, psychology, social capital

Introduction
In the 11years Facebook has existed, a strong current of academic research has focused
on how the service allows users to accumulate social capital. These works generally
argue that users can easily connect with heterogeneous social ties who may have been
difficult to engage with through other media. Consequently, these ties can be leveraged
Corresponding author:
Alex Lambert, Department of Communications and Media Studies, Monash University, Rm. T2.13, 900
Dandenong Road, Caulfield East, VIC 3145, Australia.
Email: alex.lambert@monash.edu

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for the latent resources they possess. Social capital is primarily understood as this twofold pursuit of connections and resources. Interestingly, much of this research has constructed the relationship between social capital and Facebook in psychological terms,
despite the formers origins in critical sociology (Ellison etal., 2007; Johnston etal.,
2013; Liu etal., 2014; Wu etal., 2012). The existence or non-existence of certain psychological traits and dispositions is said to influence the accumulation of social capital.
Moreover, social capital is often viewed as a means by which Facebook users can gain
greater psychological well-being (Burke etal., 2010; Ellison etal., 2011; Steinfield etal.,
2008; Stutzman etal., 2012).
This research intersects with my earlier research in its attention to the significance of
intimacy (Lambert, 2013). Intimacy is often implicated in what Putnam (2000) calls
bonding social capital, or the potential for exchanging resources with strong ties.
Intimacy emerged as a central concept in my ethnography of Facebook users residing in
inner-city Melbourne. This research reveals how intimacy has various dimensions which
are made problematic by Facebook. Many of these issues relate to the way intimacy is
practised publicly, and in relation to a fluid set of ties which carry differing meanings and
therefore varying subjective degrees of intimacy. These issues, and the solutions my
participants invent for them, bear heavily on social capital.
I argue that this influence of intimacy on social capital cannot be captured by a purely
psychological approach. It should also be understood through social, cultural and technical categories relevant to the way contemporary forms of relationships are organised
through Facebook. I begin by tracing a salient history of the concept of social capital, and
then explore its transformation into a psychological correlate. After discussing some
lacunae in this approach, I utilise my own research to shift focus onto the qualitative
moment in which social resources are exchanged through online social interactions, or
performances of connection. Here the performative element of social capital is central.
I explore key structures which act on these moments: mobile relationships, norms of
public intimacy, and systems of social surveillance. I continue to conceptualise the influence of these factors in a sociological vein, keeping in mind the problems associated with
public intimacy mentioned above. I propose the concept of intimacy capital to capture
the way in which the socio-technical skills and cultural dispositions necessary to rewardingly exchange social capital in an online public space such as Facebook are distributed
unevenly in society.

Intimacy and social media

For Hinton and Hjorth (2013), intimacy is a crucial concept for understanding social and
mobile media, which make various intimate relationships available in new ways
through different technological forms. Hjorth etal. (2012) look at how the technological
characteristics of social, mobile and locative media enrich the phenomenology of intimacy, creating a state of virtual presence they call ambient intimacy. These media also
engender intimate publics, in which the dynamic interplay of different experiences of
intimacy plays a significant role in structuring public behaviour (Hinton and Hjorth,
2013). This nexus of mediated presence and publicness lends intimacy new social and
performative dimensions, the value of which have been hotly debated. Some argue that

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these emerging modes of public intimacy engender norms which reproduce cultures of
individualism and narcissism (Rosen, 2007). Others argue that ambient intimacy as a
virtual, always on presence with many social ties may harm the potential for more
rewarding relationships with a proximately encountered group of close others (Gardner
and Davis, 2013: 92119; Turkle, 2011).
Against these criticisms, research suggests that some social media users are aware of
the benefits and pitfalls of public intimacy, and develop strategies to ensure rewarding
relationships while not sacrificing the opportunities which emerge from public sociality
(Gardner and Davis, 2013; Livingstone, 2008). An interesting question is, how do people
learn how to negotiate intimacy in this way? If this amounts to a set of digital and social
skills, how are they distributed in society? Here the link to social and other forms of capital becomes evident, though there is little theory which explicitly looks at intimacy in
this way.

Social capital: The evolution of the concept

Pierre Bourdieu was one of the first scholars to thoroughly conceptualise social capital.
He developed four forms of capital economic, cultural, symbolic and social to understand how social power relations are reproduced over time (Bourdieu, 1986). Social
capital involves the resources made available through institutionalised relationships of
mutual acquaintance and recognition or in other words, to membership in a group
(Bourdieu, 1986: 248). For example, membership in a school alumni association may
entitle a person to a specific kind of social resource, such as a job recommendation from
a respected headmaster. Consequently, this person may experience opportunities in life
denied to those who did not attend a similarly esteemed school. Social capital is not distributed evenly in society. Rather, it is accumulated over generations by those who have
stockpiles in the other forms of capital, such as the economic capital to pay for a private
education. Bourdieus key point is that social capital usually has exclusionary effects,
serving to reproduce class structures.
Bourdieu positions these forms of capital within his broader concerns over the relationship between structure and agency. Our ability to act on a form of capital say, to
mobilise the cultural capital required to perform a judgement of taste may be something learned early in life, such that this agency becomes deeply ingrained and embodied.
Bourdieu (1984) refers to this as an individuals habitus: the embodied socio-cultural
competencies made available by ones access to the forms of capital, which in turn
demarcate ones position within a specific social strata.
Following Bourdieu, Colemans (1988) influential work on social mobility began to
reconfigure the way social capital is understood and used. Coleman saw social capital as
something to be fostered in marginalised groups to overcome the limitations of their
social environments and enhance their communities. Putnam (2000) continued this shift
towards a more positive appraisal of the concept. Putnam views the accumulation of
social capital as the key process through which communities knit together and flourish.
He introduces a valuable distinction between bonding and bridging social capital: the
former describes the resources obtained from strong ties, such as personal support. These
create a sense of intimacy, solidarity and out-group antagonism. The latter describes

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resources obtained from weak ties, such as new information about the wider world,
which foster a sense of belonging within a broader community. Putnams identification
of intimacy as a key aspect of bonding social capital will become highly relevant later, as
the politics of public intimacy on Facebook, I argue, structures whether and how users
claim both bridging and bonding resources.
Putnam tends to emphasise the importance of bridging social capital, as it requires the
development of trust, collective norms and a wider sense of reciprocity, thus acting as a
kind of social glue leading to a more tolerant and empathetic society. Putnam details an
overall decrease in bridging social capital in America, which he blames on television
viewing habits, suburban living, increased work pressure and a lack of generational solidarity (something earlier wartime generations possessed). Hence, while Bourdieu is primarily critical of how social capital articulates processes of social stratification, Putnam
generally valorises social capital and advocates that we must increase our collective
stock of it.
Putnams work proved highly influential and has been enthusiastically taken up by
public and private sectors alike. In particular, social capital has been promoted in community resilience literature (Aldrich, 2012), and in literature on community health and
mental health (De Silva etal., 2005; McKenzie etal., 2002; Poortinga, 2006; Ziersch
etal., 2005). Psychology-related research is making links between personal happiness
and the possession of social capital. For example, a recent World Bank study correlated
social capital with personal happiness on the global level (Pugno and Verme, 2012). Selfperceived psychological factors such as ones sense of life-satisfaction have become a
popular means by which social capital is measured (Lochner etal., 1999). Much of the
social capital research on Facebook reflects this academic context, and is also influenced
by Putnams bridging/bonding dichotomy.

Research into social capital and Facebook

Influential research into social capital and Facebook, pioneered by scholars from the
United States, has primarily focused on whether using Facebook in general facilitates
the accumulation of social capital (Ellison etal., 2007; Johnston etal., 2013), whether
Facebook enables the growth of bonding and bridging social capital to different degrees
(Aubrey and Rill, 2013; Ellison etal., 2011; Steinfield etal., 2008), the forms of use
which lead to better social capital outcomes (Burke etal., 2010; Ellison etal., 2014b;
Guo etal., 2013; Tazghini and Siedlecki, 2013), and the civic consequences of increased
social capital (Valenzuela etal., 2009). Running through this research is a common
concern as to what psychological factors moderate social capital outcomes. These outcomes are also often psychological, such as elevated self-esteem. Hence, while theorists such as Bourdieu and Putnam are concerned with the socio-cultural factors which
impinge on social capital, Facebook researchers orient this concept towards individual
matters of the mind.
In this body of literature, various salient traits, dispositions and relational processes,
derived mostly from social and personality psychology, are correlated with social capital
measures via quantitative surveys. In an early and influential piece of research, Ellison
etal. (2007) hypothesise that self-esteem and life-satisfaction will greatly influence the

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acquisition of social capital on Facebook, causing these to become popular correlates in

a number of studies which followed. Many studies find that the intensity of Facebook use
increases both social capital and self-esteem (Burke etal., 2010; Ellison etal., 2011;
Stutzman etal., 2012). Use over long periods of time is found to show a greater correlation between life-satisfaction, self-esteem and bridging social capital (Steinfield etal.,
2008), suggesting that Facebooks psychological value lies in its affordance for activating and maintaining weak ties.
Studies commonly position key dispositions such as self-esteem in relation to other
psychological concerns, such as loneliness. For example, Burke etal. (2010) find high
self-esteem and life-satisfaction to be correlated with increased bonding social capital
and decreased loneliness for Facebook users. More general research into Internet use and
social capital finds that introverted users with low self-esteem will increase their loneliness online, a poor get poorer outcome (Williams, 2007). However, Facebook research
suggests that those with low self-esteem will increase their self-esteem by being able to
leverage bridging social capital online, a poor get richer outcome (Ellison etal., 2007;
Steinfield etal., 2008). A potential reason for this is that the accumulation of more social
contacts may lead to a greater sense of popularity and self-confidence, known as a social
compensatory practice (Ellison etal., 2007; Lee etal., 2012). However, as more studies
introduce further psychological correlates, the positive influence of accruing connections on self-esteem starts to become more nuanced (see e.g. Lee etal., 2012).
Beyond factors which directly tie into self-worth, such as self-esteem, other psychological variables have also been associated with social capital and Facebook use. For
example, Wu etal. (2012) find that self-efficacy the confidence an individual has in
participating in an online community, adapted from Banduras (1997) landmark social
cognitive theory is positively associated with acquiring social capital. Jin (2013) finds
that a persons self-system influences the degree to which he or she can build relationships on Facebook and acquire social capital. Self-systems involve self-efficacy and selfesteem, as well as self-assertion and social presence, which indicate the degree to which
people feel close to one another in a social space. A persons capacity for empathy and
conscientiousness has also been found to influence their ability to accumulate bridging
social capital (Liu etal., 2014). There is also a much broader swath of research which
looks at why people connect with others on Facebook hence implicitly touching on
social capital which utilises a range of psychological categories, including narcissism,
neuroticism and the need to belong (for a good summary of this literature see Nadkarni
and Hofmann, 2012).
The above research has made the first substantive inroads into understanding social
capital as it relates to the nature of the social networks people articulate on Facebook.
Yet, social capital in particular bridging social capital is often uncritically assumed
to be something good in and of itself, something which people just want. If social
capital is constricted, it is because of psychological categories which impinge on a
persons agency: self-esteem, self-efficacy, self-assertion, self-consciousness, selfconfidence, social presence, loneliness, introversion, extraversion, narcissism and
more. These are viewed as (a) either enabling or constraining social capital, or (b) an
outcome of social capital. Key questions are as follows: Are these the most salient
structures which act on social capital on Facebook? Do they adequately explain the

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way in which Facebook, as a relatively novel socio-technical system, could be influencing the nature of social capital?

Social capital as process

A productive way of critiquing and augmenting the above literature is through considering its common methodology. Most of this research adapts versions of the quantitative
items used to measure online social capital developed by Williams (2006). These Likerttype scales measure for bridging and bonding social capital by focusing on perceived
outcomes. For example, the question there are several people online I trust to help solve
my problems is a perceived outcome which would test for the presence of bonding
social capital, while the question interacting with people online makes me feel part of a
larger community would test for bridging social capital (Williams, 2006: 606607).
However, a purely outcomes-based methodology risks ignoring critical elements of
social capital. As Bankston and Zhou (2002: 286) note, this relates to a broader confusion in social capital literature which views this concept as something quantitative to
be accrued, rather than a process with various stages and elements. This processural
nature is evident in Bourdieus (1986) work. Bourdieu implies various stages in the
process of social capital, each of which is both cause and consequence of the others:
social structures, relationships and their shared histories (the process of instituting),
norms and expectations on resource-giving, exchanges, and the reinvestment of
resources. Here Bourdieu stresses the exchange of social capital as the moment in
which norms come into play and the qualities of relationships and their shared histories
are performed.
The significance of the exchange, and of social capital as a process, is beginning to be
reflected in the literature. Ellison etal. (2014a) look at resource requests (a process),
and Vitak and Ellison (2012) qualitatively examine how people use Facebook to exchange
support. I continue to address this lacuna through qualitatively observing how social
capital is exchanged and intimacy is produced through social interactions on Facebook.

Methodology
Between February 2010 and May 2012, I conducted longitudinal qualitative research
into Facebook. Advertisements were circulated around an Australian university campus
and across various student and faculty email lists. A total of 14 people responded and 6
were chosen. Prior research had focused predominantly on young adults, so I sampled
participants ranging in age: Penny (21, female); Odette (25, female); Sally (25, female);
Flash (31, male), Brett (33, male), John (47, male).
I became Facebook friends with my participants, using the initial six as a springboard to engage with other people online as a participant observer. I collected online
data in an ethnographic fashion for a total of 12weeks. I conducted a series of in-depth
interviews and email interviews with my participants over the entire period of research.
Often I would get back in contact with my participants to discuss new aspects of Facebook
and to see how their understandings of the site had changed. I utilised a grounded theory
approach to analyse my various data (Glaser, 1998). This involves constantly sectioning

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off and comparing data to identify patterns and inductively develop concepts. The purpose of this approach is not to generate universalisable ideas, but rather a collection of
productive concepts to inform new hypotheses in future research.
My primary participants and many of their Facebook friends were White, well educated and middle class. They lived in the inner north of Melbourne, an area known for its
student population and subcultural art and music scene. Participants had all travelled
overseas, either to visit family, for leisure, to take an adventurous gap year from university or to work in another country. Two came from New Zealand to live and work in
Australia. These mobile biographies bore heavily on what they had posted.
Overall, my participants and their friends share a love of using Facebook to post pithy,
witty comments and aphorisms, links to web pages and videos which display eclectic
forms of art, satirical politics, and occasionally religious and philosophical articles, and
photographs which catalyse both online sociality and memory. As will be discussed
below, the sociality associated with these activities can be conceptualised as social capital exchanges highly influenced by a nascent normativity of public intimacy.
In the following sections, I explore the social significance of how these participants
exchange social capital on Facebook. I then move on to the various factors which act on
these moments: mobile friendships, norms governing public intimacy, and mediated
social surveillance.

Social capital in performances of connection

The participants in this study primarily value Facebook as a place to socialise with
friends. Theorists have noted that, because these interactions happen in a kind of networked public space, they are also public performances of connection (boyd, 2011).
Such interactions foster sociality for its own sake, but also seek to perform the nature of
a relationship to a broader audience of friends. Observe this common response:
Its a common joke with the Facebook friends: youre not really friends until your Facebook
friends [] Cus people then know youre doing stuff together. Its just putting it out there,
that, you know, these two hang out. (Sally)

This point is echoed in the following dyadic interaction, provoked by a picture of

Sally and her friend at a music festival in Ireland:
Lup: sally I could shoot ya for not burning this photo. nice bottle of buckfast
between the legs!!!
Sally: this photo is brilliant! ah the buckfast that stuff was deadly. and not in the
way irish use the word, but actually death-inducing
Lup: you know the song buck fast will get ya f!!cd fast!! happy days xx
When intimate ties socialise on Facebook, they are identified as intimate, potentially
drawing in people who share this intimacy, while also excluding those who do not.
People give off what Goffman (1971) calls tie signs, letting others know they share a
strong bond by disclosing the kind of information which evinces a shared history and

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access to each others personal lives. The payoff is a sense of social territoriality and
belonging:
Theres a bit of titillation, or theres a bit of extra thrill in knowing that other people who dont
know you are getting insights into you. this weird kind of territorial stuff that happens, or
you can kind of try and prove how how good how well you know someone by disclosing
intimate details in a public forum, um, because its a way of kind of going Im Im your
really, really good friend and Im going to let everyone know it while Im talking to you. (Bret)

Performances of connection, I argue, should be understood as social capital exchanges

in which the signalling and exchange of intimacy plays an important role. Bourdieu
(1986) emphasises the way in which social capital involves a continuous series of
exchanges and is endlessly reproduced through the exchange (p. 250). This is a key
moment in which social resources are claimed and credited. Moreover, it is a performative moment in which a group articulates its identity: Exchange transforms the things
exchanged into signs of recognition and, through the mutual recognition and the recognition of group membership which it implies, reproduces the group (Bourdieu, 1986).
Hence, following Bourdieu, I am interested in the performative dimensions of social
capital, and see the public performance of intimacy as a kind of social capital resource
with significant effects.
For Bourdieu, exchanges are moments in which various other elements of the social
capital process crystallise, such as shared histories and norms. On Facebook, these act on
how intimacy is articulated and negotiated in the moment of exchange. For the participants in this study, these elements include the mobile, shared histories of friendship
groups; norms governing public intimacy; and socio-technical systems of social surveillance. I look at the influence of each of these in turn.

Mobile friendships
Western research on the constitution of Facebook networks finds that users are connected
to heterogeneous ties of varying strengths arising from different social contexts (Lewis
etal., 2008). This reflects the participants in this study, who live highly mobile lives and
use Facebook to reclaim and sustain relationships which have become distanced in space
and time. Common examples are old high school or university friends, colleagues from
previous jobs and people met while travelling or working overseas. Some scholars view
such ties as a chief source of bridging social capital (Ellison etal., 2007; Steinfield etal.,
2008). However, participants in this study reported on how some of these ties would
remain relatively weak, while others would grow close again. A mobile life-course can
often cause the distinction between bridging and bonding social capital to be quite porous.
The relationship between a Facebook user and his or her collection of weak ties is a
complex and nuanced one. Participants found a great deal of meaning in connecting with
certain ties and the promise of rekindling old friendships:
I feel [Facebook] has enabled a connection that I would have lost and I think that I would have
been I mean I think that my connections would have been poorer because of that, um, and I

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guess thats partly, you know, an aging question, you know, as as you get older you do lose
contact with people and how amazing that this technology has come along. (John)

However, not every tie is reclaimed with the intention of becoming close friends
again. Some are friended to retain a sense of connectedness, consistency and community. These ties are just meaningful enough to keep a foot in the door (Penny, 20).
Yet, there is often not enough of a shared history and close bond between these people
for one to regularly respond to the others status updates. One could not, for example,
respond to a post which is clearly aimed at more intimate ties. They would be crediting
a claim on social capital they are not entitled to:
I think there has to be sort of like a trigger to talk to them, if not, if theres not a trigger then I
wont bother. (Penny)
I can just kind of keep a sense of connection and then write to them when I see something of
interest, like theyve got a new job, so I write and say congratulations, its really great, you
know, this is what Im up to. (Sally)

As the second response indicates, triggers, as Penny calls them, are comparatively
innocuous moments of identification which are abstracted from the intimacy of bonding
social capital. It is interesting to observe Brets description of a case in which someone
failed to wait for the appropriate trigger, and credited a claim on intimate social capital
which she was not entitled to:
I put up this kind of short, two line update that was just sad guy, and I got a couple of hits to
that. [] it was fucking weird cause one of them was this girl who like, you know, I went to
primary school with [] I havent seen her for twenty odd years I dont know eighteen
years. And so this girl Rebecca, ah, replied to that post saying whats the matter Bret and I was
like, what the fuck am I gonna say to that, you know? (Bret)

Again, intimacy acts on the exchange of social capital in a significant way. Sensing
out intimacy allows distant ties to detect when they should or should not engage in a
performance of connection.
Participants also found it interesting to connect with people so as to see how their
lives had changed and to spy on them based on general curiosity:
I remember when I first joined [Facebook] I had this insatiable curiosity to find people I hadnt
seen for years. You know, either because I went to school with them or wed lost contact or Id
known them years ago and, you know, wed lost contact and I was curious. (Flash)

However, participants often lose interest in these weak ties after a while. They become
dead wood, rarely if ever engaged with. Their social resources have been exhausted.
Participants express why they sometimes defriend these ties because they no longer have
any value, often described as a ritual culling. The process of social capital has run its
course, and they come to represent either an annoyance or a threat:

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I think its quite refreshing to have less people on Facebook and and it does make your
homepage a bit more relevant and interesting. Like, sometimes you get these people that, yeah,
like, I dont care what game youre playing on Facebook or what youre doing in your life.
(Sally)
I dont like having these people I dont really know having access to my personal information,
so I cull them. (Odette)

Because mobility creates distance, it can create novel social lives and social resources.
However, the above examples elucidate how distance also creates gulfs in intimacy
which can act in an exclusionary fashion and prevent people from claiming resources
except under special circumstances and for certain periods of time.

The influence of norms of public intimacy

As well as the opportunities and limits put on social capital by mobility, similar factors
are imposed by norms of public intimacy. Many writers have criticised Facebook for
its culture of unashamed public intimacy, decrying narcissistic patterns of attentiongrabbing self-admiration, overtly emotional confessions and nauseating public
romances (Ibrahim, 2010; Rosen, 2007; Turkle, 2011). Yet, participants in this study
were highly wary of such public disclosures. They describe moments when people are
overly emotional as gross, awkward and weird. Similarly, they disparage couples
who are lovey dovey and gushy:
I find it nauseating to get statements like X has just said goodbye to her sister and is already
sad. I dont need to know, you know. I think just keep that inside, the over-emoting in a public
space to people who genuinely dont care, and I would be one that genuinely doesnt care.
(Bret)
A few friends decided to be horrifically loving toward one another and comment on their
previous posts in the most overly loving manner possible on each others walls. Unfortunately
for the 700 or so people connected to these two, the entire thing appeared on our walls! (Penny)

Participants also get annoyed when they read posts which describe banal, everyday
activities:
Its about eating and drinking and, yeah, what youre consuming on a day-to-day basis which
is something everyone does but they dont feel the need to share that with everyone via a
Facebook update. (Odette)

When I observed these posts, I found that they rarely solicited replies. That is, they
stifled the exchange of social capital. The first kind of post alienates responders by being
overly intimate. The second kind is, in a sense, not intimate enough. It does not engage
with others, being mundanely personal, rather than interpersonal. Hence, when participants exchange social capital through performances of connection, they negotiate intimacy in line with what they believe are the norms of appropriate public intimacy. This

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can mean taking a conversation to a more private space, such as a personal message. It
can mean circumscribing an audience through privacy settings, group messages or
defriending. These are key socio-technical skills. More often than not it means changing
the type of intimacy which accretes from social interactions. Conversations focusing on
what Richard Sennett (1977) calls personal malaise are avoided, while those which
revolve around playfulness are favoured:
Flash: is high-fiving the bloke who hosted Rage last night best line-up of videos
in a long time!!
Greg: I think you manipulated the list, Flash. Whats this about Malcolm McLaren,
Neneh Cherry AND Fleetwood Mac?
Flash: And I still have Steppin Out in my head genius!!
Osuka: wow, makes me wish id been watching
Flash: and buffalo stance!!
Osuka: oooh yeah! so who was programming?
Flash: i actually cant remember i was so enthralled with what was on the screen
and poor David had to sit back and endure my musical tastes (not all of
which we share:)
Flash: alas, one ommission James Reyne Hammerhead!:)
Osuka: hahahaha poor Greg;-)
Osuka: I picked up an Australian Crawl album yesterday havent played it yet! it
will have to be an occasion when you are there:-)
Flash: oh, i WILL be there if Mr. Reyne is on stereo!
Flash: OMG!! Slave to the Rhythm was playing loud n clear on Parliament
Station tonight!!
Greg: With the addition of Hammerhead and Slave To The Rhythm, thats your
musical fantasy lived out. The next time I watch late night Rage, I hope to
get a decent deal.
In making reference to various musicians which take on specific meanings for this
group, these friends simultaneously perform their collective stock of social and cultural
capital. Note the light and playful tone. Social capital imbricates through this gregarious
form of public intimacy. Maintaining this norm can be understood as an important form
of social labour consisting of cultural competencies required for experiencing the social
value of public intimacy on Facebook.

Social capital as surveillance

Facebook uses sophisticated algorithms to control key environments of social surveillance, such as the News Feed, the notifications function, the graph search, privacy settings, as well as the general manner in which users can navigate the service. The
importance of this software cannot be overstated, as it controls the modes and rhythms of
surveillance which allow users to sense out the nature of a performance of connection,
the claims on intimacy which are present, and whether or not they can be involved in an
exchange of social capital. Like other media before them, such as photographs and

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videos, these algorithms prostheticise a kind of intimate gaze (Lury, 1998), bestowing on
it new powers, while also subtly controlling where, when and on who it falls.
It is valuable to conceptualise the way Facebook users watch each other as a kind of
social capital process. When people become Facebook friends, they implicitly grant each
other access to the public information they choose to publish. Friending can be seen as
an original social capital exchange which enables later moments of information exchange
through the conspicuous observation of others.
People who share a high degree of intimacy and regular contact across a host of media
will be familiar with each others life worlds. However, Facebook reveals information on
weaker ties a form of bridging social capital which would have been hard or inappropriate to gather in other social contexts. Participants describe this as satisfying curiosity, a guilty pleasure and akin to gossip. This is especially the case for estranged
ties, such as old high school friends, who participants sometimes want to compare lives
with. Facebook can transform one person or groups intimacies into anothers curiosities.
It allows the intimacies of weak others to become bridging social capital for an invisible
audience. This is often referred to as spying, stalking and voyeurism, suggesting
there are moral dimensions to this practice which are still being negotiated. Some are
wary of this moral uncertainty, and develop strategies to overcome it:
Its kind of like knowing something about someone but you know you probably shouldnt. I
dont know. Like, youll find out that, um, an ex of yours [has] gotten married or something,
you know? Theyre probably not gonna tell you, but you know through Facebook. (Sally)
Sometimes I feel better about it when I can talk to a friend about it, because you do feel a bit
guilty. (Odette)

In response to this moral uncertainty, participants sometimes develop rationales to

justify their surveillance of weak ties. For example, Odette goes on to say, People put
the information out there, so they expect it to be seen. In other words, by virtue of how
people behave on Facebook, users have a right to claim the intimate information of weak
others.
Yet, these rationales are often undermined by moments in which people experience
the desire not to see. That is, when people witness others who fail to negotiate intimacy
in line with normative expectations and upload posts which upset or nauseate them.
Participants in this study take action to avoid these upsetting, indeterminate moments.
They use privacy settings and News Feed filters to control who they can see, circumscribing vision. In the following example, Bret describes being defriended by his
ex-girlfriend:
I read that to mean that she just didnt want to see me gushing at some other girl or didnt want
to see, you know, whatever. Bret and Sarah, blah, blah, blah, love each other so much and
really, blah, you know, that kind of stuff. So she she took us took me out the picture and I
kind of went yeah, totally fair enough.

Like the uncertain morality described above, the desire not to see points to how
Facebook undermines and destabilises the intimate gaze. In the latter case, the traditional

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power relationships associated with voyeurism are completely inverted (Baruh, 2010).
Now it is the invisible watcher who feels insecure. Overall, then, the social capital processes associated with social surveillance are not smoothly enacted. Rather, these uncertainties associated with the mediated intimate gaze influence whether people will choose
to go stalking. Again, this is the result of peoples heterogeneous networks, how people
negotiate intimacy in their online disclosures, and the way Facebooks algorithms enable
indeterminate moments of social surveillance.

Personal communities and intimacy capital

For the participants in this study, public intimacy on Facebook is emblematic of the
emergence of mobile voluntary relationships, often categorised as friendships. Urry
(2011) cogently describes how populations have dispersed globally along tangents of
capital accumulation. Consequently, there is an increased need to travel for work, education, to visit friends and family, receive important services like medical treatment and
partake in leisure activities. Pahl (2005) argues this leads to a situation in which personal communities develop based on an individuals unique, mobile biography rather
than a geographic location. Such communities no longer consist primarily of family or
kin, but of heterogeneous ties from different social contexts. In this context, friendships
become as meaningful as traditional family bonds and are increasingly relied on for intimacy and care (Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004).
According to Giddens (1991), when relationships are disembedded from traditional
structures and localities they can no longer rely on these factors to stabilise ongoing
interpersonal encounters. People take on a host of new social skills and tasks in order to
sustain their relationships, and this can be a laborious and exhausting process. On the one
hand, Facebooks various algorithms alleviate this social labour. On the other, new
labours are provoked in response to the opportunities and pitfalls of living out an intimate life in such an online public space. These labours are a response to the problematic
of public intimacy, which heavily structures how people exchange social capital on
Facebook. As explored above, Facebook users invest time and energy in negotiating
intimacy so as to publically exchange social resources, including intimacy itself. This
involves developing cultural competencies, social skills and digital literacies. It also
involves having to make new kinds of choices, such as when and when not to spy on
others, whether to accept or reject a friend request, or whether to cull social ties from
ones network. This is the skilled labour of intimacy in the digital era.
Again, this can be valuably conceptualised in terms of Bourdieus understanding of
the forms of capital. I propose the notion of intimacy capital, a critical concept which
recognises that the cultural and socio-technical competencies required to negotiate intimacy and thus have rewarding and safe exchanges on Facebook are not distributed
evenly in society. It is evident that people with different cultural backgrounds, socioeconomic advantage, levels of education, digital literacy and so forth will negotiate intimacy differently and hence mobilise social capital differently on Facebook. This echoes
Bourdieus (1984) conceptualisation of habitus. The process of accumulating intimacy
capital determines a kind of normative agency, an appropriate way of acting which
delimits what kind of social resources one can and cannot exchange in public. It is

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new media & society

interesting to enquire as to which groups in society have embodied those competencies

which alert us as to where and when certain intimate disclosures are appropriate. It may
be that one factor which separates private and public space is the accumulation of intimacy capital by large portions of society, such that they know when, where and how to
be intimate. If someone loudly shouts out personal information on a public train, it is
often seen as a failure to negotiate intimacy. This person has not embodied the required
amount of intimacy capital to stabilise the division between private and public.

Conclusion
In this article, I have argued for the importance of thinking about the relationship between
intimacy and social capital as it relates to Facebook. Both concepts are mobilised in significant ways on Facebook, and both are necessary for understanding Facebooks role in
everyday life. I have argued for a more sociological and performative conception of
these concepts, which foregrounds cultural norms of intimacy as they relate to increasingly mobile and technologically mediated relationships.
As mobile personal communities become more central in modern life, and as these
communities are increasingly lived out through networked publics such as Facebook, the
accumulation of intimacy capital by these communities seems increasingly important. A
clear problem is the way in which systems such as Facebook evolve faster than our ability to embody the intimacy capital necessary to flourish within them. This should not be
reduced to a problem of psychological agency or personality, but a problem of sociological agency, namely, the equitable access to intimacy capital. An analysis of this would
not begin with a psychological framework, but one closer to digital divide research,
which investigates correlations between socio-economic advantage, digital skill/literacy
and the use of new media (Van Dijk and Van Deursen, 2014). Importantly, this analysis
would fuse social skills and technical skills to properly understand the socio-technical
labours of intimacy.
Key questions are as follows: How is intimacy capital related to broader social and
cultural structures? What informal and formal regimes of discipline and training are
involved in reproducing this form of capital? How do different cultures as well as multicultural communities embody intimacy capital in different ways? What cutting-edge
technological paradigms are steering these processes as well? These key questions are
beyond the purview of this article, which can only encourage that they be taken up as a
serious problematic in this nascent field.
Funding
This research was supported by a Melbourne Research Award scholarship.

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Author biography
Alex Lambert is a lecturer in the Department of Communications and Media Studies, in the School
of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University, Melbourne. Alexs research looks at mobile
and social media, intimacy, and natural disasters.

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