Private sociabilities and digital practices

Over the past decade, research on sociabilities has largely focused on their public visibility via social media, often relegating so-called “private” communication to the background. Yet private exchanges have neither disappeared nor even become less frequent. Sustained by older tools (telephone, SMS, email) and by the rise of contemporary messaging services, they are being reconfigured as they proliferate in intimate circles and groups out of public view. This article first examines the uses, and their implications, of the concept of sociability in sociology and the social sciences since the 1970s, underscoring its heuristic value for grasping a wide 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, the article examines three areas of reconfiguration linked to the “private” dimension of contemporary sociabilities, as identified in the literature: the (re)compartmentalization of the digital sphere; the expansion of the “private group” form associated with instant-messaging applications; and the possibility of sociability practices related to the use of conversational agents.