Media in Transition è una conferenza biennale organizzata dal Comparative Media Studies – MIT di Boston che racconta la trasformazione in atto attraverso lo sguardo su tecnologie e forme sociali da oltre dieci anni.

Il tema di quest’anno al MIT8 è la distinzione e il racconto della relazione public media/private media, in un’epoca in cui gli stati di connessione ridefiniscono e sfumano il confine.

Noi presentiamo un panel a partire dalla ricerca PRIN in corso su Social Network Studies Italia dal titolo “Public / Private in Transition: SNSs in National Contexts” in cui abbiamo coinvolto diversi colleghi per capire come diverse comunità nazionali ridefiniscano il confine tra pubblico e privato nei siti di social network. Si tratta infatti di spazi online che sfumano l’opposizione dicotomica tra pubblico e privato, ed aprono la strada ad una nuova semantica che si fonda sulle concrete pratiche degli utenti che costruiscono e ricostruiscono il confine a partire dalle possibilità che le piattaforme mettono a disposizione e dalle forme culturali che creano.

Gli utenti usano strategicamente la distinzione pubblico/privato nei social network per modellare una narrazione pubblica di sé e cercheremo di capire in che modo i diversi contesti socio-culturali incidano.

Di seguito gli abstract che discuteremo:

Facebook and Intimacy in the Facebook Italian Users, Giovanni Boccia Artieri, Manolo Farci, Fabio Giglietto, Luca Rossi
In Italy, social media have already reached 28 millions of users, 51.2% of the population, with an increase of the 5.1% over the last year. This paper investigates how the practices of friendship on Facebook offers new meanings to the notion of intimacy – overlapping the boundaries between family, love, colleagues or peer group – and reshape the distinction between private and public community (Lange 2007, boyd Ellison 2007, boyd 2008). The research project employs a mixed method that combines an integrated quali-quantitative analysis. The qualitative phase – the first at this scale in Italy – is based on more than 120 in-depth interviews made in the Italian national territory. The quantitative phase is based on an ad hoc developed software tool aimed at collecting social information from a SNS and storing them into a large social database. This approach enables researchers to merge a large amount of data extracted from the database with the qualitative hypothesis obtained from the interviews.

From Networks of Affiliation to Ad Hoc Publics: Mapping the Australian Twittersphere, Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns
This paper maps networks of affiliation and interest in the Australian Twittersphere and explores their structural relationships to a range of issues-based ad hoc publics (Bruns, Burgess 2011). Using custom network crawling technology, we have conducted a snowball crawl of Twitter accounts operated by Australian users to identify more than one million users and their follower / followee relationships, and have mapped their interconnections. In itself, the map provides an overview of the major clusters of densely interlinked users, largely cenetred on shared topics of interest (from politics through parenting to arts and sport) and/or socio-demographic factors (geographic origins, age groups). Our map of the Twittersphere is the first of its kind for the Australian part of the global Twitter network, and also provides a first independent and scholarly estimation of the size of the total Australian Twitter population. In combination with our investigation of participation patterns in specific thematic hashtags, the map also enables us to examine which areas of the underlying follower / followee network are activated in the discussion of specific current topics – allowing new insights into the extent to which particular topics and issues are of interest to specialized niches or to the Australian public more broadly. Finally, we investigate the circulation of links to the articles published by a number of major Australian news organizations across the network.

Tweets in the Limelight: Contested Publicness around the Use of Twitter in South Korea, Yenn Lee
What is happening on Twitter has been significantly reported in South Korean mass media. In the course of year 2012 alone, 49,257 news articles contained the word “Twitter” and 1,696 out of them were headlined with the word. Based on an analysis of those 1,696 articles, the present study discusses what kind of tweets have been picked up by the mass media in the country and what kind of culture-specific discourses have been constructed and promoted around them. This discussion is carried out through the theoretical framework of “newsworthiness,” first put forward by Galtung and Ruge (1965) and subsequently revisited by many other media scholars such as Harcup and O’Neill (2001). By examining in what process an individual tweet becomes “news,” with a focus on three most high-profile cases (i.e. a celebrity authoress’ rants, alleged bullying within a girl group, and leak of a teenage girl singer’s dating photo), this study aims to shed light on the specific media context where global social networking services such as Twitter are placed and intersect with local mass media.

Like, Share, Comment: Facework and Facebook in Brazil, Raquel Recuero
With more than 60 million users, Brazilians are now the second largest population on Facebook. Because Facebook is now part of the everyday life of hundreds of thousand Brazilians, it is creating new challenges for people in the management of their discursive identities and faces among their different social circles. In this context, this paper focuses on how Brazilian are appropriating Facebook tools for face work (Goffman, 1967), to convey their roles in different social networks (such as family, friends, co-workers and etc.) (Goffman, 1974) and create and share social capital (Lin, 2001). We also discuss how users shape their discourses in order to adequate their identities to each online
group’s expectations and how aggressive discourse and collapsed contexts (boyd, 2008; Davies, 2011) play a role in their choices. Through a qualitative approach we bring data from observation, 40 interviews and a survey with 500 people to point and discuss these strategies, we particularly focus on four Facebook tools: profile, comments, likes and shares. Our main findings focus on the different uses of each tool for face work, the creation of different profiles for different publics, the implications of collapsed context and aggressive discourses in user’s choices of participation and the shift in privacy perceptions. We also discuss how the perception of different types of social capital play a key role in Facebook’s appropriation and adoption in the country.

Being Aware of One’s Imagined Audience: Privacy Strategies of Estonian Teens, Andra Siibak and Egle Oolo
Previous studies (Siibak & Murumaa 2011; Jensen 2010) indicate that young people are not only often unaware of the omnopticon of social media, but many of the teens have not yet grasped the idea that our interactions on online platforms tend to be public-by-default and private-through-effort (boyd & Marwick 2011). Nevertheless, only a small number of studies so far (Oolo & Siibak, forthcoming 2013; Davis & James 2012; boyd & Marwick 2011; Siibak & Murumaa 2011) have aimed to gather knowledge about more complex strategies, e.g. social steganography, teens implement to protect their privacy.
The presentation will give an overview of the perceptions the 13-16 year old Estonian teens (N=15) have about the imagined audience in networked publics. Based on the findings of semi-structured interviews with the young we also highlight the main privacy strategies Estonian teens implement in order to manage their extended audience. Our results challenge widespread assumptions that the young do not care about privacy and are not engaged in navigating privacy in social media. Although several of our interviewees confessed that they only kept the members of the “ideal audience” (Marwick & boyd 2010), i.e. close friends and schoolmates, in mind while publishing posts, others claimed implement strategic information sharing, self-censorship and social steganography when performing for one’s imagined audience. The latter technique was practiced especially on the public sections of social media where with the help of inside jokes, keywords and citations from movies, games, songs, or poems or a secret message was compiled.