Enmeshment Aesthetics

Social Media, Mobility, and Materiality in Chiang Mai, Thailand

Abstract

This article contextualizes and situates the city of Chiang Mai in Thailand as a social media-oriented site for imagining oneself as part of global Thailand and for partaking in the cosmopolitan petit bourgeois consumer culture. Café-hopping for social media content production purposes is that trendy phenomenon in Chiang Mai that intersects with the emergence of enmeshment aesthetics in Chiang Mai’s consumption spaces. This enmeshment aesthetics offers a lens through which identity formation and the pursuit of mobility can be understood in relation to the acts of moving in spaces and forming relations with different objects. Here, social media plays a key role in facilitating and concretizing this phenomenon that blurs the modern national, cultural, socio-economic, spatial, and even ontological boundaries. Within such blurring, new kinds of identity and modes of engaging with objects, others, and spaces have yet to be investigated more deeply. Weaving together Thai studies, media studies, new materialism, and urban studies, this article seeks to illustrate that social media and its intersubjective dimension have been utilized in order to perform and reaffirm a social media user’s imagined selfhood. Ultimately, this phenomenon exposes the ways in which the perceptual and material properties of objects and spaces become a pivot for constituting a desired self-image and visualizing it through the eyes of social media.