On November 28–29, the annual Cyberspace conference took place, focusing on the legal, social, and psychosocial dimensions of online environments. The keynote lecture on sexting and digital intimacy was delivered by Joris Van Ouytsel, Associate Professor at the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University. The conference also featured presentations by Ainize Martínez-Soto and Jaroslav Sýkora from IRTIS.
Joris Van Ouytsel is a leading researcher in the field of digital intimacy and online relationship behaviors. His work focuses on internet safety and media literacy education, the influence of digital media and artificial intelligence on relationship experiences and expressions of sexuality, understanding digital risky and violent behaviors in interpersonal relationships, and examining the antecedents and consequences of digital sexual behaviors. Recognized among the world’s top 2% most cited scholars for four consecutive years, Van Ouytsel has made significant contributions to understanding adolescents’ sexting practices, digital partner violence, and online sexual self-presentation.
In his keynote titled Understanding Digital Intimacy: Insights and Emerging Frontiers in Sexting Research, Van Ouytsel traced how academic understanding of sexting has evolved over the past 15 years. He discussed common misconceptions surrounding its prevalence, motivations, and risks, and addressed ongoing methodological challenges such as inconsistent definitions and terminology. Looking ahead, he highlighted how emerging technologies like AI-generated deepfakes are reshaping digital intimacy and called for researchers and practitioners to develop new approaches to study and address these changing forms of online sexual communication.
The keynote was followed by panel discussion, where Joris Van Ouytsel, together with Michala Šaradín Lebedíková and Ainize Martínez-Soto responded to questions from the audience.
Members of our team also presented at the conference. Ainize Martínez-Soto shared the results of her longitudinal research on how parental mediation strategies influence the extent of adolescents' sexting with people they only know from the internet. Jaroslav Sýkora presented a study on the use of digital technologies for work outside working hours and the connections between such work and employee recovery. Nina Křížová, a psychology student at the Faculty of Social Studies at Masaryk University, also spoke at the conference. She presented the psychometric properties of a newly developed scale of state self-objectification, which can be used in research on the impacts of media on body image. She developed the scale as part of her thesis under the supervision of Nikol Kvardová from IRTIS.
The internation conference Cyberspace focuses on the legal and psychosocial aspects of cyberspace. It takes place annually at the end of November at the Faculty of Law, Masaryk University in Brno.
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