The Mediated Time-Out: Social Media in Adolescents’ Intoxicated Sexual Encounters

Sociocultural research on intoxicated sexual encounters often conceptualizes drunkenness and drinking settings as culturally sanctioned “time-outs” in which norms are temporarily reorganized. However, this body of research has paid limited attention to how contemporary social media platforms mediate such intoxicated time-outs. Drawing on 10 focus groups and 10 solicited digital diaries with a total of 72 adolescents (15–17), this article explores young people's romantic and sexual encounters at the intersection of intoxicated settings and social media infrastructures. It builds on sociocultural research that understands intoxication as a (gendered) reorganization of sexual conduct and draws on affordance theory to examine how social media platforms actively shape intoxicated sexual encounters. Based on the empirical material, we show how social media enables some intoxicated sexual practices while constraining others. These processes of mediation are gendered, which we illustrate by highlighting two practices of “drunk texting”: impulsive and strategic initiation. Examining these practices, we suggest that social media may enable gendered asymmetries in intoxicated sexual encounters to be challenged while simultaneously supporting the ongoing performance and reproduction of these same patterns.