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Are digital media institutions shaping youth's intimate stories? Strategies and tactics in the social networking site Netlog

Drawing on a participatory observation in the popular social networking site (SNS) Netlog among Northern Belgium youngsters, this paper offers insights on how SNS institutions can be understood as actors that order storytelling practices in everyday life. Specifically, this paper deals with intimate storytelling practices that give meaning to sexuality, gender and relationships, developing a feminist and queer political critique on SNSs' focus on the production of intelligible intimate identities and endless performative flows of stories. Theoretically, this paper proposes to put central everyday media-related practices to understand SNSs as actors shaping intimate stories, dialectically brought in relation to the website's political economies and the cultural powers through which software is designed. Empirical illustrations show how de Certeau's concept of tactics is useful to expose a complex struggle between digital media institutions power and everyday appropriations.