Dr. Nimmi Rangaswamy gave a keynote talk on The Deep Like – Contextualising Digital Infrastructures of Teen Social Media at the Digital Expressions of the Self symposium, held online on 9 September. In her talk she discussed  debates of anonymity and pseudonymity, of intimacy, desire, connection and attention in teen life, drawing a few examples across continents and technology genealogies. She also outlined the interplay of the In Real Life (IRL) and the digital.

The symposium was part of a research collaboration led by colleagues at the Department of Communication,  University of Hyderabad and Goldsmiths University of London. 

This symposium engaged with the digital forms of expressions of the self and invited papers that explore the ways in which digital techniques now allow the construction of selves that often rely more on algorithms than any ‘original’ referent. The conference also explored  how people experiment with creative expressions of and the constructing the self in the digital sphere involving processes of experimentation that in turn allow one to experience the self in multiple ways.