Giovanni Boccia Artieri

Networked intimacy. Intimacy and friendship among Italian Facebook users

ABSTRACT In this paper, we describe the results of a qualitative study conducted with 120 Italian Facebook users to investigate how Facebook enables people to achieve a mutually constitutive intimacy with their own friendship network: a negotiation of intimacy in public through self-disclosure, where the affordances of the platform are useful to elicit significant reactions, validations and demonstrations of affection from others. We observed that, in order to achieve various levels of intimacy on Facebook, people engage in various strategies: Showing rather than telling, Sharing implicit content, Tagging, Expectation of mutual understanding and Liking. These strategies produce a collaborative disclosure that relies on others’ cooperation to maintain the boundaries between private and public space. Based on these premises, we developed a framework of collaborative strategies for managing public intimacy that both systematizes and extends the findings identified in previous studies of intimacy on Facebook. We describe this framework as networked intimacy and we discuss the consequences of it in the light of already existing research on online self-disclosure.

The Virtual Image Technology, Media, and Construction of the Visual Reality

We are experiencing a passage from the mostly representational function of images (the traditional media of photography, cinematography, television) to constructed images made with new technologies, especially computer graphics and virtual reality. We are left with images as formal abstractions, that make us think of a mediation of cognitive/ experiential models of reality, rather than a simple representative reproduction. With virtual reality the image presents itself more and more as reality, stressing its constructional statute. The image is no longer a map that orients the mental ways, but a real territory to explore.

Social Media and the Challenge of Big Data/Deep Data Approach

As sociologists and media scholars, we have been facing an explosion of data regarding every aspect of our everyday life. We observe the human behavior through this large amount of data that we distribute online as contents and conversations (on Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Content created by users online (UGC) is a new kind of research topic in the field of social sciences, and it gives us particularly promising data. The digital nature of the information, on the one hand, and their enormous quantity on the other hand, change the phase of recovery and structure of the research data within social media. In other words Big Data have been changing the way we are thinking and conducting the research: we are able to analyze in depth a wide range of data as never before, facing a scenario rich both of opportunities and critical points to not understate . To observe this reality means to take into consideration a complex scenario, which is characterized by the contingency of these processes, the affordances of different technological platforms, the networks created by friends/followers, the topical networks generated, for example, by #hashtags, the structure of conversations, and the meaning of generated contents. At the same time, we need to think the relationships between Big Data and Deep Data and consider in which ways the data quality present in the quantitative aggregation (that is, the Deep Data present in the Big Data) is structurally different from the one graspable, for example, through ethnographic approach and in-depth interview techniques.

Immagini per il presente. L’evento catastrofico nei Twitter online (visual) data

La ricerca qui presentata ha come oggetto le pratiche di comunicazione visuale su Twitter avvenute in occasione del terremoto che ha colpito zone dell’Emilia Romagna, Lombardia e Veneto il 20 maggio 2012. A partire dall’analisi di un campione di 4.256 immagini circolate durante il primo giorno di scosse, il lavoro ha individuato come la produzione e diffusione di queste immagini su Twitter: 1. abbia svolto una funzione sia informativa che relazionale; 2. abbia prodotto una narrazione dell’evento traumatico orientata al presente, contribuendo a ristabilire un dominio simbolico all’interno di un evento traumatico come puo essere un terremoto.