As in the English language, Italians use the same word for all friends – in general life and on Facebook: amici. In the household survey respon-dents had difficulty in assigning their Facebook friends to the different categories suggested by the questionnaire: friends from the workplace, friends from the neighbourhood or colleagues from school. People could assign many of their Facebook friends to all of these categories at once, and they could define levels of friendship that were different from those suggested by the questionnaire. In this rather small settlement with important regional mobility, most people think they have known
Facebook 14% 59%
Fig. 2.4 The frequency of use of different media in Grano (data from the household survey, n=106)
each other forever. In many cases this is true, as they might have gone to nursery and to school together, played in the same neighbourhood or at least have a common distant relative or, indeed, friend. Their paths may have diverged at some point in their lives, but after having their first child they would tend to rediscover their friendships, maybe because once again their schedule and interests had become similar. Therefore the term amici includes all these subtleties in a rather self- explanatory and inclusive way. The way people separate their amici is through giv-ing them differentiated access to their own lives, be that via Facebook, WhatsApp or face- to- face encounters.
Desktop computer
Motorcycles 55% 43% 12% 01%1%
Cars 6% 40% 44% 10% 0
None One Two Three or more
None One Two Three Four or more
Fig. 2.5 Inventory of electronic devices (a) and household possessions (b) (data from the household survey, n=106)
At the same time, social media does not usually enhance sociality.
For example, Alfredo is known to be a rather secluded person. He follows quite a predictable daily rhythm as he moves between the apartment he shares with his fiancée, his parents’ house, the nearest food shops and his workplace (he is a part- time physiotherapist). He rarely talks on his mobile phone, almost never uses text messages and his online presence is confined to his professional Facebook page, which is managed by his fiancée. But Alfredo has a big passion for films and the Italian mafia. He could spend hours watching films on television or downloaded from the internet, and talk with his friends about his collection of Scotch whis-key and the latest article or book on the Italian mafia that he has read.
However, Alfredo comments that showing all this on Facebook would be simply too much.
This is related to the fact that most Facebook postings in Grano are related to work activity and cultural capital.11 I will define my use of the latter term. In any community, there are a myriad reasons why people may either look up to or down on other people: these could be disagreements over the best way to raise a child; a sense of superiority because of having greater wealth; or because a person holds a degree or has a vocational talent. Sometimes these differences are expressed in more subtle ways. For example, some people talk in a certain way or they express their liking of a particular art object in a way that intimidates those who do not. By doing this, people show they are different. Often this difference does not translate into money, but into another sort of capital that is cultural.12
I need to define another key term. Sociologist Erving Goffman famously showed that the way we behave in the world is similar to act-ing in a theatre play.13 We are not only conscious of our role in society, but we also want to deliver to the audience the best performance we can, given a specific role. This includes trying to manage what other people, as the audience, think of us. In this situation the self is not just one rigid and autonomous entity. Rather it is an intrinsic part of the multiple plays in which it acts. Therefore the self varies according to which social role a person is playing in their daily lives.
My research shows that in Grano the use of social media relates to notions of selfhood within social relations. With the exception of teenagers, intense social media use does not create cultural capital.
Rather, it is the other way around: people who consider they possess some sort of higher cultural capital feel obliged to show this on social media. They also tend to use the media in general more extensively. For example, many lawyers, doctors, accountants and teachers read daily
newspapers, listen to the morning news on the radio and watch the evening news on television; they talk endlessly on their mobile phone in their free periods and they text in their busier periods. They update their Facebook page when coming back from work and Skype their rela-tives and old university colleagues at weekends. They actually use a vast range of media products in order to keep pace with their profes-sional and domestic duties, and also to reflect their particular position in society.
In contrast, people with a lower social and economic background tend to use Facebook much more than email or Skype. They tend to have busier work schedules and they watch television and talk on their mobile phone much more than they use other media. Farmers and small pro-fessionals, such as plumbers, builders and painters, scarcely use social media at all. A typical example would be a self- employed man in his mid- forties who works by the day in construction and has an old dusty Nokia phone and no Facebook account. He does not have an internet connec-tion at home, but every now and then uses his sister’s, who lives on the floor below in the same house. Most people from lower social and eco-nomic backgrounds use mobile phones more rarely than their wealthier peers. They barely send more than a few text messages a week and use the phone just a few times a day, usually to the same group of people. As we will see in Chapter 6, this reticence in using social media is related to an educational background that did not support computer literacy, and the complete disconnection between work and electronic media.
The reason why stone carvers, potters and artists actively use Facebook is to increase the visibility of their work. Their online activity is very much centred on their work. Because they produce objects that are highly appreciated and prized by people with high cultural capital, they themselves come to be very prestigious in the community. In this case, their higher social status boosts their online presence. It implies appre-ciating the aesthetic and moral qualities of their work. Friending them on Facebook and constantly validating their activity online has become a common way to borrow something from their distinguished standing.
People with similar social and economic backgrounds and profes-sions can have very different ideas of how social media should be used.
For example, the dynamic head teacher of the vocational high school in Grano accepts friendship requests on Facebook only after her students graduate from school. She thinks that this distance is mandatory for delivering a good education to her students. In contrast, some teachers do not hesitate to mix the seriousness of their work with the ambigu-ity of Facebook. They actively encourage students to set up Facebook
pages and WhatsApp groups for the various activities they are involved in, in an attempt to help their students to bond better and to collaborate when doing homework. This reflects the different ways in which people in Grano use public- facing social media to reflect what they see as their social role.
A further variation is in how occupations determine the uses of media. For example, shop assistants with less demanding jobs and many state employees connect to the internet through mobile devices during periods of inactivity at work, much more than they do in their free time. Then, while most people in Grano have just one mobile phone and are quite discreet on social media, many entrepreneurs have two smartphones and, like teenagers, could have more than 1,000 online connections. They regularly update their personal Facebook profile and the Facebook page of their business, and spend hundreds of euros on communication each month. At the same time they rarely use email and Skype, and have little time to watch television. Housewives are more active online during the early afternoons when they are less busy. These variations again express people’s dispositions in using social media.