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This book explores how digital communication generates new intimacies and meanings of friendship in a networked society, developing a theory of mediated intimacies to explain how social media contributes to dramatic changes in our ideas about personal relationships, through themes of self, youth, families, digital dating and online social capital.

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1. Introduction 2. Technologically Mediated Personal Relationships 3. Conceptualising Intimacy and Friendship 4. Self Preservation Online 5. Social Media and Teenage Friendships 6. Home, Families and New Media 7. Digital Dating and Romance 8. Virtual Communities and Online Social Capital 9. Mediated Intimacies

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"There is much to recommend this book in the way it synthesises the research of leading digital scholars and the extent it draws on the theoretical frameworks of Bauman, Beck, Giddens, Goffman and many others to help us understand the effects of digital media on our personal and public lives." Information, Communication and Society

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Deborah Chambers is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Newcastle University, UK. Her research areas intersect sociology and media & cultural studies. Her publications include Representing the Family; New Social Ties: Contemporary Connections in a Fragmented Society; and A Sociology of Family Life: Change and Diversity in Intimate Relations.

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