Private sociabilities and digital technology

Over the past decade, research on sociability practices has largely focused on their public visibility via social media, often relegating so-called “private” communications to the background. Yet these discreet exchanges have neither disappeared nor waned: sustained by older tools (telephone, SMS, email) as well as by the rise of contemporary messaging services, they are being reconfigured and mutltiplying intimate circles and groups out of public view. This text first revisits the conceptual deploymnet and uses of sociability in sociology and the social sciences since the 1970s, underscoring its heuristic value for grasping a broadened diversity of practices. It then underlines the centrality of this concept in studies of communication and information practices associated with digital technologies, highlighting its continued relevance over the past ten years. Finally, it examines three lines of reconfiguration linked to the “private” dimension of contemporary sociabilities, as identified in the literature: the (re)compartmentalization of the digital world; the expansion of the “private group” form associated with instant-messaging applications; and the possibility of sociability practices related to the uses of conversational agents.