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.

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

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.