IS IT (MICRO)CHEATING? HOW SOCIAL MEDIA CONFOUND ASSUMPTIONS IN ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS

Abstract

Social media have changed the ways we communicate, meet others, and form intimate relationships. However, technology can also mediate intimate partner surveillance and abuse (Muise, 2009; Tokunaga, 2010). One of the most explicit ways to understand these shifts is through the transgressing of relationship boundaries, defined and enforced by settler-colonial notions of compulsory monogamy (TallBear, 2020). Anxieties around cheating have evolved along with our technologies, as evidenced by ambiguous new terms like “microcheating” and “emotional cheating” (Lusinski, 2018). In this in-progress, mixed-methods study, we examine new definitions of cheating through analyzing discussions about potential transgressions on Reddit. Specifically, we investigate 1) which behaviors cause uncertainty in emerging forms of social media-enabled infidelity and 2) the degree to which relationship discourse online naturalizes the extension of compulsory monogamy into online space. For our pilot analysis, we used computational techniques to elicit common subjects within subreddit posts to then analyze qualitatively. We began with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), an unsupervised natural language processing tool, to organize Reddit posts and comments by topic (Blei, 2012). Then we qualitatively analyzed Reddit discourse by using critical discourse analysis. Our pilot analysis suggested a belief that proof of (in)fidelity can be found on a partner’s smartphone, such as by reading texts. This orientation toward evidence then justifies surveillance and hacking of a partner’s phone and computer presence, construing the invasion of privacy as the right to truth. This preliminary finding suggests that discourse around transgressive behaviors on social media likely reiterates compulsory monogamy and settler sexuality.