Who moved my conversation? Instant messaging, intertextuality and new regimes of intimacy and truth

The article investigates the shift of much interpersonal communication from phone or face-to-face interaction to instant messaging, especially among teenagers. This objectification of conversation enabled changes in myriad social practices, as well as in regimes of intimacy and truth: new, invisible audiences are introduced to hitherto intimate situations for real-time consultations; intimacy, traditionally based on exclusivity in access to events and information, has to be reshaped under the new conditions as ‘network intimacy‘; formerly separate events collapse into new frames, challenging traditional temporal sequencing of sociability; conversations are imbued with performativities of different sorts; and proof and evidence are introduced into interpersonal spheres where they weren‘t common before.