Curating the Family on Social Media
The family album has migrated from the physical shelf to the digital feed, transforming private kinship into a performed, public, and interactive spectacle. At the Institute, we investigate how social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are reshaping the practices and meanings of family. Parents curate elaborate accounts for their children ('sharenting'), couples perform their relationships through anniversary posts and couple selfies, and extended families use private groups to share news and coordinate events. This digital curation is not merely a record; it actively constructs family narratives, reinforces bonds across distances, and creates new forms of familial surveillance and pressure. Our research asks: How do these performances align with or distort internal family dynamics? What new obligations do family members feel to 'like' and comment on each other's posts?
New Forms of Intimacy and Connection
Beyond the biological family, digital technology enables entirely new forms of kinship and intimate connection. We study phenomena such as:
- Chosen Digital Families: How online communities, especially for LGBTQ+ youth or those estranged from biological families, become vital sources of support and chosen kinship, using terms like 'framily' (friend-family).
- Long-Distance Intimacy Maintenance: The routines couples and separated family members develop using video calls, shared photo albums, messaging apps, and even synchronized movie-watching to sustain closeness across continents.
- Online Dating Cultures: Ethnographic research on apps like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge reveals new courtship rituals, language codes (e.g., 'ghosting,' 'breadcrumbing'), and algorithms that mediate desire and connection, often commercializing intimacy.
- Post-Breakup Digital Untangling: The complex process of managing shared digital assets, unfriending, and dealing with the algorithmic persistence of an ex-partner's memory in feeds and photo memories.
Intergenerational Dynamics and Digital Literacy Gaps
Digital kinship is fraught with intergenerational tensions and misunderstandings. Grandparents on Facebook interpret posts differently than their teen grandchildren. Parents struggle to monitor their children's online lives while respecting their privacy. We study these 'digital literacy gaps' and how they affect authority, trust, and communication within families. In some cultures, the family WhatsApp group becomes a site of political debate and generational conflict. In others, sending remittances via digital payment apps becomes a new ritual of filial piety. Our comparative work examines how these dynamics vary across cultural contexts where concepts of family, privacy, and obligation differ profoundly.
Furthermore, we investigate darker aspects: how digital platforms can be used for domestic abuse through surveillance stalking, how family disputes over digital legacies erupt after a death, and how the pressure to present a 'perfect family' online contributes to anxiety and isolation. By treating digital kinship as a serious field of study, we illuminate one of the most fundamental ways technology is transforming human sociality. We move beyond dystopian fears of technology destroying family life to document the nuanced, creative, and sometimes fraught ways people are using digital tools to love, connect, fight, and care for each other in the 21st century.