We should recognise that the way people in Grano use social media is not typical of general Italian society, or even that of southern Italy. Every time I started to explain findings from my field work to Italian friends and col-leagues, anthropologists who work and live elsewhere in Italy, they would comment immediately that behaviours were very different in Milan, Rome or in other parts of the south of Itay. I would then have to give a detailed description of Grano society and explain its particular relation-ship to the regional and national setting. In this section, we will lay out this explanation which is essential for understanding the rest of the book.
In the introduction we saw that people in Grano are aware of their marginal position and look up to the wealthier north of Italy and Central Europe in almost every domain, from the economy to fashion.
People often compensate for this by networking locally, which has major social and economic implications. Facebook works to reinforce, rather than to challenge, this mechanism. In Grano Facebook does not bring globalisation, inclusiveness and equality, but rather it brings a clear mirror which reflects the local society.16 For example, Facebook is dominated by endless appreciations of the local environment and products, be these the beauty of the local landscape, the quality of
the food, the aesthetics of artigianato (‘artisanship’) or the excep-tional nature of the music and traditions. The permanent emphasis on summer as opposed to other seasons on Facebook, as in the entire cultural life of Grano, is part of a tendency to distinguish this region of southern Salento from the rest of Italy and to create a local narrative of the sublime.17 However, at the same time people in Grano suggest that even these qualities miss out on the management and organisa-tion available fuori (in other places). Therefore they use Facebook to attach themselves to different versions of the ‘superlative’ that come from higher levels of Italian society, and to work out their respective roles as guardians of these values.
The synthesis of the two concomitant forces that come, on the one hand, from higher society and, on the other, from local tradition is done through a concern and ability to craft the self, which is clearly meant for public admiration. This is now seen as a major reason to use Facebook, because this environment is seen to complement and validate offline public visibility, and it is also situated halfway between the local and the higher levels of society. As we will see later in the book, this is medi-ated by a small but highly visible cultural vanguard, which is influen-tial in promoting both local exceptionalism and attachment to national and international values. The vanguard is composed not only of local intellectuals, politicians and artists, but also of local celebrities, fash-ion houses, beauty salons and some artigiani. They are seen as holding the highest cultural capital in Grano. Usually these individuals are well connected outside the town and have prime access to critical informa-tion and resources. Therefore they act as true gatekeepers to the higher levels of Italian society. We will see that these people, who represent perhaps less than 5 per cent of the local population, have found in social media a promising environment where they can take over some criti-cal features from conventional media channels, such as the television, the printed press and advertising, and turn them into supplementary sources of cultural capital.
A typical example of how social media brings or consolidates social prestige to those who think are they are entitled to it is that of people with a higher education in Grano. In Chapter 6 we will discuss why, during their period of under- employment, people with a higher educa-tional background sense an acute need to have somewhere where they can register their special knowledge, thoughts and skills that are not currently demanded by the local job market. With time on their hands, many love to stress in subtle ways on social media different aspects of their knowledge. Here they specialise in different, non- lucrative
genres, such as commentating wittily on current Italian politics, shar-ing more pretentions, ideas and skills, or participatshar-ing regularly in different social and cultural events in the region. Some become enthu-siastic environmental activists, set up small vocational groups or spe-cialise in various digital projects, such as the design and maintenance of an online presence for a variety of local institutions and businesses.
As many commented, if they were not active on Facebook they sensed they would feel left behind in their society. Facebook allows for this kind of self- expression in the absence of a work environment suited to their training and knowledge.
By being active online many highly educated people work at restoring the social prestige to which they think they are entitled. They often feel conflicted in their personal use of Facebook as they have both to address the local norms of posting, which many might find restrict-ing and limitrestrict-ing, and still to display their more glitterrestrict-ing cosmopolitan interests and views that reflect the social life of the university cities where they used to live. Many have more Facebook contacts from those metropolitan places than from their home region. One woman who had accepted almost nobody from Grano as a Facebook contact com-mented: ‘I prefer to meet them [local friends] and talk in person. I find it strange to friend [on Facebook] people who pass in front of my door.’
Now, if many of those highly educated individuals enjoy position-ing themselves as partially outside the all-too-constrainposition-ing local expec-tations between offline and online behaviours, this is not true for those who have already consolidated their higher capital. For example, the local aristocracy, intellectuals and politicians hardly ever adopt alter-native identities online or play with the local norms. Their Facebook postings are a permanent compromise between the presentation of their family and interventions related to their work. So these individuals are relatively less witty and relaxed online, and their postings tend to be more focused and applied: politicians can exhaustively comment only on mainstream political news items or local initiatives; most authors cannot depart from their lyrical style when posting; and aristocrats restrict their online presence to family and close friends.
The higher strata of people in Grano put constant effort into pub-lic appearance. They see Facebook both as an enabler of social visibility and as a potential danger because it can reveal unwanted aspects of indi-viduals and their personalities. So they are extremely attentive to con-trolling their online presence. This is true for most people in Grano and results, as we will see in the next chapter, in the majority of Facebook postings being about issues everybody agrees on. This suggests that
innovation and change reside in the medium itself and not necessarily in what people do on that particular medium.
In contrast, most people from the lower levels of the local economic and social hierarchy view Facebook with relatively more reluctance, as many are not very sure how they can contribute to the values expressed in this environment. In particular, young people often see social media as representing promising tools to reduce the gaps with their peers and to demonstrate their attachment to collectively shared values. Although this chapter has shown the diversity of such media and the choices peo-ple now have, it is already clear that they rarely use this new opportunity to do anything that would not be approved of by their peers, even if they do not particularly agree with some of those peers. Almost nobody in Grano ignores or unfriends their Facebook connections. In my survey on social media use, just 4 per cent of the respondents declared that they had ever ‘de- friended’ somebody on Facebook because of their political views, even though this is perhaps the major source of public dispute among the adult population.
This completes the image of a highly conventional use of social media in Grano. We suggest that social media are not seen as bringing something particularly new because most people use them in a man-ner that coincides with the existing norms of their society.18 As a result, Facebook rarely allows space for people to reinvent themselves and be creative, if this is not in keeping with how they are offline, and so this particular use of Facebook is only achieved by some teenagers and very few liberal cultural elites and artists. As we will see in the next chapter, conformity with the offline persona is usually expressed by manipulat-ing a handful of online methods and genres that may seem quite varied at first glance, but which all point to the recurrent themes of the impor-tance of social visibility in relation to personal values.