Raffaella is a 14- year- old student at the local high school. She is of medium height, thin, with long, straight dark hair and big black eyes.
She has had a Facebook account for two years now. Her profile is public as she has never thought this could be a problem. She has 840 Facebook friends, mainly school colleagues. Usually each day after lunch she turns on her family’s laptop, arranged in a corner of the sitting room, and clicks on to her Facebook account, which is usually already logged on. For two or three hours Raffaella does ‘everything
she needs to do’: homework, which usually involves chatting with dif-ferent people in her class; listening to music on YouTube; checking out the official website of One Direction, her favourite band; leaving comments and a few ‘likes’ on Facebook; and following a few conver-sations on WhatsApp. Sometimes, especially during the long winter evenings, she goes online again after returning from her piano lessons or after dinner. Raffaella knows she should post more statuses and be quicker when replying online if she wants her own thoughts ‘to count’.
But she feels she does not really want to make an impression (postare per farmi vedere). Last time she changed her profile picture was more than three months ago.
Raffaella’s mother is quite reluctant for her daughter to use Facebook. She created her own Facebook profile when she decided a few years ago that she had to see what Anna Maria, Raffaella’s older sister,
‘was doing there’. So she friended her online, and now has herself gained almost 80 online friends, most of them women: mothers, relatives and more than a dozen friends of her two daughters. The mother often won-ders how her daughters can post just ‘everything’ on Facebook. When I talked to the family, the mother was quite confused by how Raffaella seemed not to make any choices about what she should and should not post online, or to differentiate among her online friends when post-ing on private issues. She remembers bepost-ing horrified when Raffaella announced excitedly on Facebook that she was in love, or when she posted a few photos of herself wearing professional make- up.
The first shock had been when Anna Maria posted photos from her 18th birthday. Her mother described how uneasy she had felt when going through the photos uploaded by her daughter online. She opened them slowly, in sequence, examining details and nervously waiting to see what the next photo in the group would be. She sat by herself, at the desk, not knowing what to expect. She remembers that all she felt were thousands of curious eyes scrutinising her daughter and leaving com-ments that sometimes had an insolence she simply could not bear. The photos were not even taken at home, but in a restaurant, and she and her husband were not in the photos. The parents do take photos occa-sionally, but they always keep them private, stored on the camera or the family computer, and rarely look at them or show them to others outside the family. As a parent, she knew that turning 18 was extremely import-ant for her daughter, but she, nevertheless, felt invaded and increasingly sad when going through the photos. She kept thinking how the pho-tos were simply out there, available for anyone to see them whenever they felt like it. After a while she stopped reading the comments, which
were mainly saying how beautiful Anna Maria looked and sending her love: ‘Belllaaaa!’ (Beautiful!), ‘Sei bellissima come sempre’ (You are beau-tiful as always), or simply ‘ ’.
In contrast, Raffaella’s father has quite a different attitude to being online: from time to time he shares slightly inappropriate videos on WhatsApp with his daughters and never really looks at what they do online. Because of his more demanding work schedule as a teaching assistant, he spends less time at home with his family. In contrast, like many of her female friends, Raffaella’s mother feels directly responsible for her daughters’ behaviour. Many mothers feel they have strong rea-sons to be nervous, for example, when looking at the immense number of online friends their children have, while they themselves and most people they know have far fewer such contacts.
Referring to the way teenagers use Facebook, another young mother told me bluntly: ‘They don’t know how to use it’, and continued, irritated: ‘Because they put everything there!’ The mother was annoyed by the amount of information that left her house through her 15- year- old daughter’s Facebook page and, more generally, by the fact that her daugh-ter’s Facebook friends also seem not to filter out or edit anything when posting. In contrast, whenever she herself posted something online, she tried to think of her Facebook friends as a collection of distinct social categories, such as family, friends, simple acquaintances or work col-leagues. She then tried to give to each category something that would be meaningful for them. Indeed, most adults in Grano think of their online audience as a collection of different groups of friends. It is within each of these groups that the visual postings are decoded and recognised.
Most teenagers, however, have just one way of posting on Facebook, which is for all their contacts to see their posts. If they want to enter a specific discussion, they use Facebook chat or WhatsApp messages instead. Teenagers’ undifferentiated postings on Facebook were seen by parents as too open, direct and annoying. Teenagers also seemed not to draw a clear distinction between online and offline. For example, unlike adults, teenage couples expected each other to ‘like’ each other’s posts, hug, smile, send purple hearts and continuous appreciations to each other as a clear signal to others of their relationship.
Thus social media provides the setting where teenagers learn and practice sociability inside their various peer groups, with no significant help or guidance from adults, just as was the case when they were playing in the town square. Psychologists have famously shown how, between the ages of 11 and 15, children begin their evolution from an egocentric to a wider understanding of the world.5 This means that children start at
this age to realise they are not in fact the ‘centre of the world’ and start to look at the world from multiple angles. In social terms, this process corresponds to a movement from a concrete to a more abstract under-standing of relationships. For the present discussion it is important that teenagers now enter into a vast system of communication and relations with a large number of peers in a relatively short period of time. There seems to be little time and space for them to learn to filter out ideas or be very strict in following pre- defined rules for communicating in the way that adults do. Instead teenagers attempt to sort out these rules through experience, that is, on the go, which actually means while being active on social media.
Many young people argued that they did not need a smartphone because they could meet their friends in person if they wanted to.
Nevertheless most of them actually had a smartphone and used it to expand these offline encounters in spaces and at times that were con-ventionally related to other activities. Perhaps the most important shift caused by new technology in the last decades was the shift from the predictability of everyday face- to- face encounters to the ever- expanding possibilities generated by the newly mediated encounters. For teenagers, exploring these possibilities was seen as essential in establishing social relationships and crafting their personhood, while many parents saw the media as uncontrollable and potentially dangerous.
My student survey showed that 72 per cent of respondents had more than 500 Facebook friends and 18 per cent more than 2,000. But teenagers knew far fewer people personally. The tension between the confined space of physical encounters and the expanded space of possi-ble interactions opened up by the online environment was expressed in an obligation to show a relative consistency between offline and online interactions. For example, many young people promptly sanctioned those who pretended or demonstrated online that they were different there than they were offline: ‘Some [colleagues] do not even greet you on the street and at home [on Facebook] they talk to everyone, they comment, . . . ’ So, for example, a girl who regularly uploads lots of sel-fies taken at home, dressed and made- up provocatively, is then obliged to adopt an equally extrovert attitude at school. The fact that young people will criticise this kind of inconsistency in what they call ‘reality’
and ‘Facebook’ suggests that social media does not give them a sense of ‘unreality’ or ‘mystification’, but rather that they generally expect to find online what they already know from the offline environment.
Consistency between online and offline is seen as ‘truth’, while repeated variations are sanctioned as inappropriate and disappointing.
The quantitative data shows that what teenagers most disliked about Facebook was the lack of privacy (20 per cent), inappropriate behaviour, which included self- promotion (19 per cent) and fake profiles (10 per cent). Subsequent interviews with students confirmed that, for most, Facebook was about being true to oneself and not transgressing boundaries. For example, the aversion to fake profiles was related to the fact that offline your friends simply cannot be fake. Indeed, most teen-agers do not assume different roles in different social contexts as adults can do. Therefore, if being truthful is an essential quality offline, most teenagers do not see any reason why this should not also be the case online.
The opportunity for extreme visibility is exploited by the few teen-agers who for different reasons use Facebook in order to mettersi in mos
tra (put themselves on display). This is perhaps best exemplified by the category of bimbiminchia – relatively young children who behave online and on social media as if they are much older, or who adopt different, narcissistic or annoying stances. Every school has a few students who are accused of falling into this category: ‘people who don’t ever have their own identity and depend on their own idol, posting embarrass-ing photos and publishembarrass-ing insignificant thoughts enriched with stupid words like ‘I roll over’, ‘I cry’, ‘I burst’, ‘aww’’ (Laura, 19 years old). This definition also suggests that intimate and intense feelings are to be kept private and not trumpeted in the face of unknown people. At the same time, a tolerant opinion regarding excessive self- promotion online was: ‘This is simply what he’s doing [showing off on Facebook], he just thinks he is good looking’ (Antonio, 18 years old). As we will see later in the book, these two judgements set limits for normative behaviour online.
At the same time, the concept of privacy is not simply related to the ego. Many teenagers condemn an indolent attitude in those peers who do not protect their privacy online. Inappropriate photos are not only seen as a possible embarrassment to those who have posted them – some teenagers said that they themselves did not want to see other peo-ple’s overly explicit photos. These considerations are essential because Facebook is associated with relationships. What teenagers liked most about Facebook was the ability to stay in contact with friends and family (34 per cent), to see or post photos (20 per cent), to chat (10 per cent) and to get to know new people (6 per cent). Only 2 per cent appreci-ated Facebook as a source of information and updates, compared to 41 per cent who appreciated the internet primarily as providing a source of information, news and research.
As the story of Raffaella and Anna Maria suggests, at the time of my field work there was a general unease regarding the use of social media by teenagers in Grano. Parents were anxious because they did not really know what their children did online. They were annoyed when they saw their children nonchalantly contravening the limits they themselves had prescribed for public media.6 In turn teachers scolded students and some parents because mobile phones frequently interrupted classes and some students filmed them while they were teaching. On the other hand, most students saw mobile phones and social media as educationally useful in allowing them to exchange homework via WhatsApp or because, in a handful of cases, they could be in the same online group with their favourite teacher. But otherwise the vast majority agreed that the last thing they used social media for was actually to study.
There were important differences in social media use across social groups. In the poorest neighbourhoods in Grano, where the school drop- off rate was highest, young people start using Facebook a few years later than their wealthier peers, typically at 14– 16 years old. Until this age, for many, social media and digital technology were less accessible: they could not afford a new smartphone, a personal computer, mobile internet subscription or broadband internet connec-tion at home. Teenagers from lower social and economic backgrounds also sensed an important lag in appropriating the language and genres used online. For example, one student told me she sometimes does not feel like going online where many of her better- off colleagues domi-nate the discussions. She may also feel embarrassed that she cannot upload photos wearing new clothes on Facebook, and is disheartened when looking at photos from birthday parties to which she has not been invited. Many teenagers confirmed that the school does very lit-tle to introduce them to the use of new media, which might reduce the gaps between students. The few IT classes focus on a rather theoretical curriculum so it is up to the parents to transmit technology and com-puting skills to their children.7