Feeling good, feeling safe: Domesticating phones and drugs in clubbing

While personal media devices are part of and transform most parts of contemporary, everyday life, their role in nightlife leisure cultures remains mostly neglected. Infusing the domestication approach with assemblage theory’s attention to material emergence, this chapter interrogates the normative, spatial, and practical organisation of smartphones in club culture, with special attention given to the role of party drugs. Based on four semi-structured interviews with gay men in their 30s and 40s attending the same techno scene, smartphones are found to be important in the control of drug use, general sociability, and clubbing affects. Similarly, drug use is shown to be a site of perceived risks that with the right taming can emerge as safe and pleasurable. Theoretically, domestication analysis not only introduces media sensibility in a field sorely lacking thereof but also allows for its joint interrogation with drug use – another key, yet underexamined, infrastructure of clubbing. This is achieved by attuning the framework to a broader spectrum of materials by including biochemical, intra-body transformations that domestication analyses otherwise forego. With phone practices being inseparable from clubbing, an ever-evolving party drug landscape, and the intense social pressures surrounding nightlife, the suggested approach is set to have great potential for the evolvement of club studies.