Politics occupies a special place on Facebook, as it is by far the most dis-puted topic in Grano. Young and adult men post about politics much more than women or teenagers. The three main genres of posting are political memes, news items from the mainstream or regional media, and the per-son’s own political comments. The first two categories are accompanied by brief comments or indications such as ‘incredible, do read and real-ise what these people are doing . . . ’ or ‘speechless . . .’. Political memes usually express either current political situations or generic ideological themes. News articles are shared by people with a higher cultural capi-tal who are extremely well informed, read a few journals a day and reg-ularly watch political debates on television. Some of these people tend to post relatively more philosophical comments and elaborate status messages.
The posting of political memes and shared material on Facebook has allowed people the opportunity and forum publicly to share polit-ical criticisms and ideas that previously they would have only shared with their families and close friends. The consequence of this is not that more people from the region are involved in politics because of the internet and social media, but that more people are encouraged to participate in a public sphere that was previously restricted to just a few – mostly local politicians and intellectuals. This suggests that people use social media to share ideas that often challenge the higher structures of society.
Photos posted from political scenes are usually quite spectacular and dramatic, such as rallies, fights in parliament, war and violence in the world or unlikely actions of major Italian politicians. For example, in the autumn of 2013 an innocent posting of ‘Good morning’, accom-panied by a photograph in which Nicky Vendola, the president of the main left- wing party in Italy and governor of the region of Puglia at the time, shook hands with Silvio Berlusconi, caused a severe out-break of rage and heated discussions over a period of three days. These took place on the Facebook Wall where the photo was initially posted despite repeated attempts by the owner of that Wall to calm down the situation.
Sharing political photographs and videos is much more popular among people with a medium level of education, and it is often done to express frustration and anxiety. In recent years the dominant political subject shifted from critiques of Berlusconi to those of the rather unsta-ble Italian political scene. The relatively new political force Movimento
(a)
(b)
Fig. 3.21 Political memes: a critique of the Milan Expo 2015 (a) and a meme inspired by the developing exodus across Mediterranean Sea towards Southern Europe (b)14
5 Stelle focused on producing online material.15 As this political move-ment has built its success on the internet environmove-ment and free online content, they produce a constant flood of short videos showing initia-tives by political leaders, criticisms of the government, rallies and an internal election scheme in which candidates could present themselves on YouTube, which are all very visible on Facebook.
Political postings can also be witty and humorous (see Fig. 3.22).
Paolo is a 34- year- old man who works on a temporary basis in a cen-tral bar. He is a revolutionary spirit and very interested in politics. He actively comments on other people’s postings but, for himself, he just shares interesting social and political news. From his Facebook page, you would not know whether he was married or had children. However, when you talk to him, he is extremely communicative and can tell you stories for hours. He just does not see any reason to put any of these stories online. He thinks that private issues should be discussed with friends and only what is ‘really’ public should be put on Facebook. Out of his preoccupation with politics, Paolo created a particular online char-acter who is now well known in Grano as being smart, attentive and always up to date. It is within this online space that he can enjoy working and engaging with ideas in a way that his paid job as a bartender does not allow him to do.
Fig. 3.22 Edited photo of a handmade presepe that reads: ‘Prosperous’
Christmas and ‘Fascinating’ New Year!’ [Signed] Mario Monti [Italian prime minister at the time] (© Biagino Bleve)
The way most people use Facebook is not to protest or change the world, despite many having strong feelings about it, but to laugh about a well- known situation that nobody seems to be able to change. It is true that this marks a shift from the practice of reading the news as a more private and passive pursuit to a certain empowering of citizens, as many authors have remarked.16 However, in Grano political postings do not usually denote an increase in information and political activism, but rather a broader acknowledgement of the way individuals understand and practice politics. This also suggests a new sort of political violence in which the subject under scrutiny is not a distant and autocratic power, but sometimes their own peers and people from the community. It is this sense of realpolitik having descended on Grano via Facebook that makes people involved in politics extremely sensitive about the online mate-rial – as can be seen when the mayor exclaimed after receiving numer-ous birthday wishes online: ‘I had no expectations that Facebook could bring me any good surprises anymore . . . ’.
Discussion
The stories and illustrations in this chapter show why Facebook can be understood as neither a reflection nor an extension of a person’s true self. Rather, people in Grano use Facebook to reflect their different needs for social visibility. These needs could be related to a personal tal-ent, looks, sensibility, the importance of family life, social solidarity or involvement in politics. The ‘audience’ could be the local community, friends from Grano, the group of intellectuals in their Facebook account or the ex- colleagues from their university who now live in other parts of the world.
Facebook represents an environment where all these groups and networks can be brought together and where the average user has to find ways to respond to this diversity. The result is that most postings tend to relate in different ways to the general and the universal, by empha-sising one specific feature that is at the core of their social group, such as a passion for music, football or politics. The true self is reserved for the family, God, friends and is not seen as representing something that should be of interest to the larger world. Facebook reflects just what the individual, as the result of local social forces, perceives as being ‘show-able’, ‘desirable’ and not too intimate.
Most people do not see the point in trying to be too specific on Facebook. They have their offline relationships and personal media
where they can be specific and thorough. This is expressed in the quite popular practice on Facebook of posting generic comments that are intentionally ambiguous so that only closest friends or family members will actually know what they refer to because they have the right keys to decipher the comments. For example, when Enzo writes a witty sta-tus on Facebook criticising an Italian celebrity who has just appeared on television wearing extremely high heels, only his close friends know that he is particularly passionate about such shoes and always spends a fortune buying high heels for his girlfriends.
This shows the limits to public display, but also that Facebook is an inclusive and comfortable realm that corresponds to how people like social life to be in Grano. Many people do not use this service to connect to the wider world or to create private relationships with those who share similar tastes. So people in the region tend to agree that they enjoy Facebook, but do not take it too seriously. In a local context in which everybody knows everybody else and most people do not really need to communicate online locally, Facebook helps to establish a sphere where individuals feel they can show what kind of person they want to be. Most of the time this means upholding the particular position they already have in their society.
In short, this chapter has shown the limits of seeing social media as technologies simply used for communication. In Grano they are also not used for self- representation since most of what matters about a person is not posted. Instead the people of Grano use social media in a much more limited and specific way. People use this new visual field to complement the other things they do and the other places they express themselves by finding something that previously did not have such an easy outlet. Sometimes people use social media slightly to overstep, in an acceptable way, the local norms by expressing, for example, a feeling of pride in their local landscape or a particular genre of political opinion or sophistication through slightly clever angles and informal posing. In each case social media can be used to add a small element to what is already known about a person, in the same way that a people might have a small hobby, such as baking cakes and memorising poetry. However, most of the online audience does not know everything about the person who posts. Social media adds something worthwhile about them that is quite, but not very, personal, hence the general view in Grano that posts should be moral and ‘good’.