We have seen that in Grano people define themselves by insisting on internal (intellectual, moral, cultural) and external (clothing, expres-sion, attitude) aspects of their personality, which are always considered in relation to the values they are expected to uphold. This results in people communicating in several concentric groups, such as the nuclear family, the extended family and the local community. At the same time care is taken that this does not contradict norms in the social hierarchy.
In this context, social media plays a critical role in ensuring that these different requirements are given a type and level of visibility that can be recognised and approved by the different segments of the community.
Let us start with the most popular media by far: television. My household survey shows an average of 2.3 television sets per household, which can be correlated to an average of 2.5 beds per household. The best television is usually placed in the salone (sitting room), but the most used is often the one in the kitchen. Television watching follows people’s daily rhythms and reflects the structure of the society: housewives fol-low the more practical television programmes before and after lunch as a background to domestic work; teenagers watch television in the early afternoon; professionals enjoy watching political shows in the late eve-ning; unemployed people may watch television late into the night; and
almost everybody watches the news during lunchtime.39 Some business owners and newspaper reporters watch television programmes on por-table computers during work hours via online streaming.
In contrast, radio is much less used in most households. Some intellectuals and professionals may listen to the early morning news before leaving for work or while having their coffee. People who com-mute by car do listen to the radio intensely, for example on their short journey to Lecce. Radio is, however, widely heard in public spaces, such as shops, cafés and restaurants, where it is usually tuned to regional stations specialising in Italian music. A local radio station based in a nearby town broadcasts three channels across the entire region and a local entrepreneur has invested in a private small television station, but is waiting for the advertising rates to go back up to the levels they were at before the economic crisis.
Newspapers have a distinguished place in local culture that goes back to the beginning of the nineteenth century when the first local and regional journals were established. Currently there is a thirst for infor-mation and a true culture across the social spectrum of following the news. The two weekly journals published in Grano are distributed in all public spaces and sometimes even delivered door- to- door. Most devout families subscribe to the weekly famiglia Cristiana (Christian family), half of the parishes in Grano publish their own monthly journals and most schools have their own regular publication. Basically, in any house in Grano you will at any time find a few different journals. The biggest local journal encourages ordinary people to write articles or contribute to its content in other ways: in 2013 it had more than 40 contributors over and above the editorial staff. Even though it is available online, everybody reads the printed version.
The newspapers’ local news items are popular; they are continually discussed on the streets and inside households and compared to the tele-vision reports. Most people agree that the local press always reflects the reality better than the national media, even though they realise it is some-times biased by political views. The argument is that, unlike national television channels, it does not favour the bigger economic and political interests.40 At the same time the local press never publishes any negative news regarding individuals in the community. For example, incidents such as domestic violence, drug addiction, or small criminal activities by local residents are only discussed face- to- face in conventional social settings. There is simply no tradition of making something public, even if everybody in the town already knows about it. There is no correla-tion between news discussed innumerable times in innumerable private
spaces and the making public of negative news. In this context Facebook is seen as an environment that brings together concomitantly many dif-ferent sources of information: local, regional, national and global, but it still follows clear norms regarding their distribution and interpretation.
The matters which are deemed worthy of public visibility can also be seen in the numerous public announcements or in the constant investments shop owners make in decorating their shop windows and refurbishing the interior of their commercial spaces. Whereas the taxes imposed by the administration for public advertising are considered affordable, the costs of the advertising agencies are prohibitive. It costs
€600 to advertise one medium- sized poster for two weeks, so small businesses use Facebook intensively for advertising. One co- owner of a hairdressing salon estimated that her promotions on Facebook gener-ate a customer increase of less than 5 per cent, while outdoor advertis-ing bradvertis-ings an increase of 10 per cent in customers who also spend more money inside the salon. Most business owners prefer to have a Facebook page for their business and invest only from time to time in expensive outdoor publicity because it adds prestige and an additional note of reli-ability to the business. But on most occasions business owners print out posters and leaflets and ask retailers to display these for free.41
In the context of a rather poor internet provision locally, young people in Grano are pleased with the advent of mobile internet, which has taken off since 2010. There are only two public spaces left that offer free internet access, for a maximum period of one hour a day: the public library and the job centre. Just three public spaces offer free wi- fi ser-vices to their clients and one café offers fixed internet access at €2 for half an hour, which is considered quite expensive. At the same time, the cost of internet broadband is fairly high – between €19 and €40 a month which may include free landline minutes – and many families cannot afford it. Internet access in schools is limited to the classes on Information Technology, but both professors and students find that connections are much too slow. School students and those in higher education use the internet mainly as a search tool: they fare ricerca (do research) for their homework, look up information on their preferred celebrity or read news. There is a general sense that the internet is a place to go when you need to find something particular, and this is sim-ilar to how television is perceived.
Email is virtually unknown among teenagers and not very popular among the rest of the population, except for those who use it at work. In my household survey just one- fifth of respondents declared they used email on a daily basis. People with a higher education tend to use email
and LinkedIn more, but even so these tools are not really perceived as responding to their personal needs. If we add in that only 3 per cent of the households owned an e- reading device we can see that what peo-ple are really passionate about is owning electronic devices such as computers, video consoles and smartphones that allow them to play and relate more informally. For example, 64 per cent of the households surveyed had at least one home video game device (PlayStation, Xbox, Wii), which was often used by several members of the family. Typically it is the young father who acquires the gaming platform for himself (some-times offered as a present by his spouse), and then invests regularly in games encouraging his children to play together. Even if today’s teen-agers prefer playing games on their personal electronic devices, we may say that home gaming is still seen as a social activity in most families in Grano.
A similarly strong emphasis on socialisation can be seen from the social media survey, which showed that 70 per cent of the respondents never clicked the ‘like’ button for a local business, and many who did were families or friends of that particular business.42 A common explanation was that physical presence and permanent interaction are important and people did not see any reason to follow online a local commercial activity they had known personally for many years. However, online shopping from international networks (Amazon, eBay, Groupon) was quite popular among young people because they could access products faster and at cheaper prices than through local businesses.43 At the time of my field work there were two businesses in Grano offering electronic marketing services and, in 2014, around one-third of their revenue was assured by a handful of clients. The general director of one of these companies confirmed that this was simply because his customers had pushed him in this direction, so a couple of years ago he and his small team decided to make a considerable investment in hardware, training and employing a professional web designer. They had not really thought that internet- based services would be so successful.
Texting is hugely popular among teenagers who can easily send several hundred text messages a month, and, with the advent of WhatsApp, the older population are texting much more than before.
If in the summer of 2013 WhatsApp was considered a somewhat pre-tentious or little- known service, in less than a year it became the most used mobile application because people see it as complementing voice calls and Facebook, providing increased intimacy between mothers and children, between fidanzati or between best friends. This is reflected in most adults having a relatively small number of WhatsApp contacts
(20– 25 on average) and being part of just a couple of groups on this platform. Mobile phones can also represent a major source of anxiety, such as when a young woman hears her partner’s phone buzzing at one o’clock in the morning.
In the light of my research I understand social media as being any media that enables some sort of communication within a group. In scope this could be a direct, indirect or broadcast communication, and in terms of time it could be either synchronous or asynchronous. While public- facing media resembles traditional broadcast media, though to much smaller groups, the more private media looks more like traditional dyadic communication but may extend to groups, which is what makes both social media. Mobile devices such as smartphones invite a fast reac-tion time, while most of the people I talked to preferred to sit at comput-ers inside their homes and revise the photos they have uploaded when they were outside, search for a specific song or film, or simply look at the perfect photo of their classmate in higher resolution. For most peo-ple the use of Facebook on the street is considered ‘too much’ because it denotes inattention and possibly self- promotion. Therefore, using the public Facebook in the intimacy of the home represents the proper way to act. This is what most people recognise as being the pleasure and grat-ification of social media.