Photo by Gabriela Nicolescu

There are two local newspapers and a regional one in the Italian town where I am conducting fieldwork. They appear once a week before the weekend and are distributed freely in the main hot spots of the town, like cafés and retail units. The biggest one is published in a few thousand copies, a significant number when one considers  the town’s population is almost 20,000. Its editorial line is strongly on the social side, so that more popular themes like politics are not discussed. While the main editorial team is composed by a few men who work pro-bono for the publication, anybody in the local community can contribute as author. The editors encourage this kind of public involvement through a series of initiatives such as local writing contests or symbolic prizes offered to prestigious Italian journalists. Last year around one hundred people from the local community wrote at least one article for the journal, out of which more than a dozen were considered constant contributors.

The impact of this journal on the social life of the town is amazing. Almost every adult who enjoys reading newspapers reads carefully at least the main column on the front page which represents the subject of the week. This could be then debated over a few weeks in different public spaces, in the subsequent numbers of the journal, or in various other local media, such as Facebook. People usually trust the information in the journal much more than the news coming from more distant sources such as national journals or the RAI. It seems to represent a sort of undeniable proof for the different social issues within the local community.

I will not discuss here the intellectual and cultural issues that are at stake with this journal as neither my research is interested in these sorts of disputes. Rather, I am interested in how  the local population relates to this particular media and how different this relationship is when the same content is made available on Facebook. There is a whole discussion on the role of social media in the current Italian society, see, for example, the way the political movement MoVimento 5 Stelle (Movement 5 Stars) has constructed much of its political success on the massive popular mobilisation through the internet and social media. However, I will limit this posting to a few considerations on how people in the small town relate to the news on Facebook.

If teenagers and some young people could easily have 800-1,200 Facebook friends, most of the adult population have somewhere between a few tens and 200. The only adults who reach the teenagers’ numbers of online connections are particular public actors such as artists, social activists, entrepreneurs, or people involved in different ways in media. Their Facebook profile is almost the same: they post on different social issues or share joking posts and let their online connections  comment or disseminate this information. As these actors recognise that their audience is very eclectic, which also implies they do not necessarily share the same the political or social views, they usually prefer to not moderate these conversations. Their most common explanation is they do not afford to loose connections or their interventions are less important than the initial postings. At the same time, if some people enjoy participating to the online debates, most of the audience does not. They rather prefer to discuss the different issues offline, within the family, or in particular circles of friends. It is here where Facebook seems to act like a newspaper. Like journals wait for clients in an empty caffe, Facebook pages wait for people to access them when they don’t have anything else to do.

However, the type of information individuals gather from the two sources are very different. If in the local newspaper people are interested in the public news, in Facebook users tend to look for the private persons who are interested in news. To wait for public news on Facebook is nonsense. This might be interesting for different activists or entrepreneurs, but most of the people seem to spend huge amounts of time online just trying to find the information that is most private and available in a relatively public environment. The reasons could be pure friendship or curiosity. What is important is that most of the time in the private world of Facebook, news is unimportant if it do not serve to better understand your peers.

Photo by Razvan Nicolescu

Epistemologically, this project is starting from the premise that ‘social networking’ is not something new. In the project proposal I suggested that the science of anthropology was founded on the belief that societies should be described as complex social networks, rather than as aggregations of individuals. In such social networks, individuals occupied different roles, which were put into evidence by the ethnographers in relation to their particular interests within the discipline, focus on kinship, economic relations, political organization, and so forth, as well as to the different paradigms they were actually working in.

At the same time, anthropology is a peculiar discipline when it attempts to understand the whole by a minutiae description of the particular, or of the partial. In other words, as Danny put it during our group discussions, anthropology often tends to become a partial aggregate of rather disparate detailed descriptions. Positivist methodologies or holism represented different kinds of ways in which anthropologists attempted to grasp the totality of a culture. They did so by employing a vast array of techniques, be they methodological, writing or interpretational.

This project aims at restoring this epistemological shortcoming. The eight simultaneous ethnographies in seven countries could formulate unique universal claims on the nature of social relations. The aim is not to recuperate terrain from other social sciences, such as sociology or geography, but rather to give an anthropological understanding to some of the common grounds on which anthropologists are working anyway.

The opportunity given by ‘social networking’ resides mainly in the fact that with the advent of digital technology, the human social networks tend to be encapsulated in something with true universal pretentions. At the same time, for the average user of online social networking, this does not necessarily correspond to any particular ideological or economic imposition. One may argue that these impositions could be obvious at other levels, such as at the level where the dominant Western world imposes its classificatory categories or tastes, but this research attempts to demonstrate whether this is actually true.

For example, whether new media technologies are created by egoistic entrepreneurs, or, by contrary, by idealistic activists, I suggest that they actually end up in being used by people in ways which are consistent with their respective social contexts. In particular, thinking about my fieldsite, I suspect there is a clear expectation from people in Italy who belong to a particular class and political ideology that they should behave in a particular way on a particular social networking site. The expectation does not stem necessarily from any imposition created by technology itself, or by its perpetrators. Rather, I suggest that new technology grants people freedom to work towards what they actually want to be. In my work, I suggested for a dialectical process in which, on the one hand, the individual, and, on the other hand, society, press people into particular kinds of persons. Throughout this process, technology seems to act as a sort of mirror (as Strathern suggested) in which people recognize themselves and the society they are part of. I am excited to explore these issues in the field.