What We Talk About When We Talk About Social Media

FAUSTO COLOMBO

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media history is very recent and dates back- as we will see later in detail – to the very last years of last millennium. The term “social media” is even more recent, even though its origins can be traced back to Tim Berners Lee’s statement in the nineties.

The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect — to help people work together — and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner. (Berners-Lee 1999, p. 110)

The term “social” has here a double meaning: at first it combines an adjective to a certain kind of technology; secondly it underlines that technological innovation is mainly something else, hence a new way of thinking about relationships in the world.

This is a good starting point: to observe that social media, beyond appearances, are not only a technological matter, but paradigm shift that brings into play diverse dimensions of social life.

Moreover this is the only possible way to study media: press, television and radio history cannot only be reduced to linotypes, valves or transistors. Technological features are rather essential but not sufficient to media development. An important role is instead played by organizational models, by economic factors, by contents circulating and by user behaviors. There would be no media without them.

So we can talk about social technologies as long as we keep in mind that these technologies are not by themselves enough to account for their importance in contemporary life.

1 A timeline

Since when could we start to talk about innovations, discoveries, entrepreneurial successes, consumer behaviors which gave birth to social world? A timeline allows us to understand the complexity of this issue (Van Dijck 2013).

We could start by looking at those infrastructures allowing global connectivity: in 1957 Sputnik, the first earth orbit satellite; in 1974 the first setup of Ethernet; in 1984 for the first time Fidonet system interacted with different BBSs (Bulletin Board System); in 1989 DSL (Digital Subscriber Line); not to mention the digital conversion of radio frequencies (its discovery dates back to the end of the nineteenth century) or the telegraph discovered since the early nineteenth century.

Otherwise we could try looking at computer history, which began with von Neumann’s and Turing’s experiments in the forties, the fifties and sixties(even though the pioneers were Charles Babbage and Vannevar Bush). Since 1965, mainframe computers gave way to desktop computers, which became personal and micro computers in 1975. In 1976, the first Apple computer while in 1984 the Macintosh, the first revolutionary machine for its easy use, following the experiments of the celebrated computers Commodor 64 and Spectrum ZX.

In 1982 the newsmagazine Time (titling “ The Computer Moves In”) proclaimed the computer “person of the year”. In 1985 Bill Gates launched Windows and its graphical interfaces, and the year after Steve Jobs launched Pixar and its innovative computer animation.

It followed a different story: the computer became a terminal for network connections or interacted with other media. As computers became terminals, networks were no longer meant as infrastructure but as relational contexts. In 1969 Arpanet was born, as the first project of a communication network able to withstand a military attack because of its flexibility. The project was born in the military field and was developed thanks to some major American universities. In the nineties the project entered the market with a pioneering and entrepreneurial spirit.

In 1971 Ray Tomlinson send the first e-mail. In 1979 emoticons were created, allowing users to include moods and emotions in a written text. In the early eighties TCP / IP protocol developed, which enabled computers connected to the network to communicate. In 1985 the first connected community, The Well, was born. In the same year modems and national domains were born. In 1989 the first chat line was created while, thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, HTML and the WWW were born. In 1992 the first webcam was setup and the year after the first browser, Mosaic, was released.

With regard to interactions with other media, in 1981the digital camera Mavica was launched by Sony. In 1983 Ithiel de Sola Pool, in Technologies of Freedom (de Sola Pool, 1983), talked about convergence, as a key term to understand interactions between computers and other media. In 1995 DVD was on the market, as the first optical disc storage format. In 1996 Nokia 9000 Communicator improved GSM service allowing sending emails from mobile.

However another timeline could be drawn, that is closely interlinked to the history of social media, and that in fact embodies the history of new tools, new services, new businesses made possible by digitization and the web. In 1991the High Performance Computing Act, a US law allowing to extend the web for commercial purposes.

According to Castells (2001), this is the US way of promoting the web: at the beginning large public investments, and at a later time free market. Some services designed for the web are based on “remediation” of traditional media, using Bolter’s and Grusin’s (2000) term (e.g. online newspapers).

In 1994 Yahoo and Netscape were born and soon traded publicly. The “New Economy” burst, based on the rapidly increasing stock prices in internet and technology sectors and especially in new dot.com companies. In “New Economy”, Nasdaq became the stock market index, the indicator of the performance of stocks of technology companies.

In the same year, Linux was born, as the first and most famous open source software, which aimed to prove, according to the philosophy of its creator Linus Torvalds, that collaboration between programmers and users, beyond competition, should favor innovation.

In 1995 MSN, Amazon and eBay were born, while in 1997 SixDegree, the first social network, was born. In 1998 the first mp3, Google, the first eBook and the earliest forms of e-commerce were released.

In 1999 ADSL, thanks to its bandwidth, allowed faster browsing. A social media such as Myspace was born and Napster, a system for free file sharing, changed music consumption before being closed for copyright infringement.

In 2000, the Nasdaq index underwent a vertical collapse, generating one of the most dramatic crisis of capitalism and of New Economy.

However innovations did not stop: in 2001 Wikipedia and Second Life were born, respectively a free collaborative encyclopedia and an online virtual world. In the same year, Apple launched the iPod which overcame other portable music players. In 2003 ITunes Store, while in 2004 Flickr and Facebook, which would be listed on the stock exchange in 2012. In 2004 Sony launched in Japan the first eBook reader, LIBRIè.

In 2005 YouTube was born (later bought by Google), in 2006 Twitter. In 2007 Apple launched into the market the first iPhone and in 2010 the first iPad, a new format for mobile technology.

In 2004 during the “Web 2.0 conference” Tim O’ Reilly explained in detail the meaning of “Web 2.0”: all those services survived to stock market crash of 2000 and those born after. O’Reilly noted that the first had even been strengthened, while the latter tended to develop new and original market strategies.

The term Web 2.0 became then the label for new services and new web platforms such as Google and Youtube, chat services such as Windows Messenger and finally blogs and social networking sites. The main features of these media are well known: multimedia, usability, allowing users to upload contents and to make them visible, and to create a reputation developed through successful daily presence within their own networks.

The intersection between these new media and mobile technologies (smartphones and tablets, for example) allow users to be almost always connect with others in more or less stable and rooted “communities”.

However “web 2.0” is obviously a buzzword, aimed to label an evident and recognized, but fluid phenomenon. The same phenomenon can be differently label by using several definitions, that more modestly try to grasp some aspects, without totalizing claims. We will try now to name a few of them in order to tackle the issue we aim to discuss.

2 Digital Convergence

The term “convergence” has for a long time gone along with “digitization”, meant as the gradual transformation of media and technology, and summarized by Nicholas Negroponte in his bestseller Being Digital (Negroponte 1999). In summary, “technological convergence” means digital conversion of any content and the blurring demarcation between different media.

According to Negroponte, the convergence has its own rules influencing social change. His approach is naïve from a sociological point of view and is usually named “technological determinism”. However, there is no doubt that this way of understanding the “impact” of technology addressees the common feeling of those who are facing a revolution: “nothing will be as before”. A few years after Negroponte’s book, another guru of digital technologies, Henry Jenkins,

gave a rather opposite definition to “convergence” (Jenkins 2006). Jenkins’s approach is not primarily technological but rather mediological. His focus is not mainly upon development of standards or of devices, but rather upon cultural circulation that these standards and devices enable. Inspired by a media scholar, Lisa Gitelman (Gitelman 2006), Jenkins points out the dual nature of media: on one side technologies enabling communication, on the other a set of social and cultural practices developing within these technologies. I quote a sentence from Jenkins which seems to me very clear:

A medium’s content may shift (as occurred when television displaced radio as a storytelling medium, freeing radio to become the primary showcase for rock and roll), its audience may change (as occurs when comics move from a mainstream medium in the 1950s to a niche medium today), and its social status may rise or fall (as occurs when theater moves from a popular form to an elite one), but once a medium establishes itself as satisfying some core human demand, it continues to function within the larger system of communication options. Once recorded sound becomes a possibility, we have continued to develop new and improved means of recording and playing back sound. Printed words did not kill spoken words. Cinema did not kill theater. Television did not kill radio. Each old medium was forced to coexist with the emerging media. That’s why convergence seems more plausible as a way of understanding the past several decades of media change than the old digital revolution paradigm was. Old media are not being displaced. Rather, their functions and status are shifted by the introduction of new technologies. (Jenkins 2006, pp. 14-15)

Hence, according to Negroponte, convergence is peculiar to digitization, while, according to Jenkins, convergence has been around for a long time and digitization allows its new stage. That’s why I use the term “digital convergence”, to explain the current technological conditions of social media. It is a two-sided (technological and cultural1) and long time process and is divided into several steps (Colombo, 2007; Colombo, Fortunati, 2011).

We have previously taken into account the development of ever more consumer-oriented, powerful and easier computers. We could identify a turning point in Macintosh and then Microsoft Windows system releases. Thereafter computers did not only increase and miniaturize but somehow began to pervade every other media, thanks to computerization processes in production. Digitization, developing interfaces and ever more interacting devices involved at first, in the late seventies, several industries (such as press industry) and gradually extended to all areas of production and consumption.

Since the late eighties, the social significance of computer developments was clear, and it is even clearer today looking at any historical attempts to define computer features as a tool (Turkle 1984). For instance, computer has been defined as “metamedium” (Bettetini & Colombo 1993). This term aimed to point out the ways computers contaminate any technological devices, and at the same time the ways computers were going beyond previous technological devices.

Computer language is based in binary code (1/0) and therefore homogenizes any type of signal in this binary code. In short, written words or drawings, photos or sounds are convert into a unique binary code, in which they can be managed, transferred, stored and so on. Hence it was quite obvious that digitization would impact traditional mainstream media but also media studies: different platforms through which television, radio, newspapers, cinema and recorded music had its own independent channels of production, distribution and consumption. At the same time, however, the advent of computers allowed to carry on a debate over several issues which have been taken for granted in the analog era.                                                                                                                          1 See Williams (1974) to analyze the relationship between technology and cultural form.

Both analog and digital media enhance one of the most natural human activities: communication. The technological complexity of these devices (their “opacity”) have not inhibited their usability. Their usability has rather been strengthened, hence reducing any effort. We could argue that digitization has allowed to create ever more complex and ever more usable devices, and that’s why computer has played a crucial role in the media revolution. For instance we could look at the pervasiveness of displays to understand computer history and importance. A display is a particular type of digital screen, in which words and images coexist. Indeed, it is a screen in which images and words become the same, at least as regards their technological sources. Moreover, displays have been easily incorporated in several devices, either as channels to provide information to the user, or tools to integrate communicative potential of the device itself. The display of a washing machine, for example, is the communication interface of the apparatus, as well as a television screen remains a interface which gives access to content and information. The display of a Smartphone or a tablet, however, are both one and the other, inextricably, depending on whether you look at pictures or Youtube videos, or you send SMS, you play games or you set ringtones. But beyond these differences, the display states, however, the era of a technology communicating.

2.1 Writing, text, image: three long revolutions

From a purely technological point of view, digitization has an impact upon media allowing several revolutions which have been amplified by social media. I would like to take into account three crucial revolutions in writing, text, image.

Writing One of the first effects of digitization has been to challenge alphabet. As in the case of television, of cinema and of radio, which have challenged writing in favor of a neo-oral society, the advent of computer has been a much more complicated process, which is worth to briefly take into account.

The first step has been the introduction of word processors: in this case writing changes gradually from being a process that moves the text away from the writer to a dynamic creative process of patch-working. While in press print text is usually objective and static, in memory mass storage or in the web, text becomes something endlessly rewritable in which text portions can be shifted, summed, deleted or placed together hence influencing the very meaning of text. The development of creative writing software and their increasing interaction with editing software enables contest and style curation (such as the choice of fonts, titles, images and so on). This ever changing writing process becomes in the web a never-ending collective writing process, in which each user can contribute to the discussion, and to the improvement of knowledge. Comments on blog posts or Youtube video posts or ever changing Wikipedia contents served to increase the amount of writing in the web (Burgess & Green 2009). Each user is increasingly part of a stream of collective writing, and is therefore responsible for what he/she writes and shares. Text The second impact of digitization (i.e. hybridization between computers and other media we called “digital convergence”) comprises the shift from text to hypertext and the theoretical problems this shift involved since the early experiments in the sixties.

In those years, early semiotic theories were mainly focused upon the notion of “text” with two major schools of thought: “strong” theories (text is to be understood as a rigid and variously articulated structure), and “weak” theories (text has to be understood at the end of the communication process). The shift to hypertext, based on T. H. Nelson’s and D. Engelbart’s researches, was a great challenge, both from a technological and theoretical point of view. Hence, by using electronic programming, few words or parts of text could become links leading to other parts. This opportunity was immediately welcomed by some avant-garde writers, whose writings were no longer unique and straightforward reading paths, but involved as many possibilities as reader’s choices to follow the various links (these literary hypertexts circulated on floppy disks: Landow 1997). “Weak” theories seemed more suitable to analyze these writings, because they somehow imagined the reader’s active interpretation as much freer from any constraints than “strong” theories might do. However, further developments have again changed everything.

At first, in the web, “internal” hypertexts became “external” in the sense that they could be linked to other “places” in the web. Indeed, the very website structure consists entirely of a system of more or less activated references and links, which can be depicted as a huge “rhizome”. In short we can say that the entire web is a huge hypertext, produced by continuously collective overwriting (Bolter 2001).

It is no coincidence that one of the strengths of this avant-garde writing experimentation in the eighties was to put at stake the very notion of “author”, inviting readers not only to freely follow the links and to write different stories with different developments, but also to integrate them with their own writings, hence creating new writings. This is actually the web today: a utopia of collective production, infinitely possible in ever-changing ways. However, some recent trends are contradicting the natural tendency towards absolute openness of the web: Apps can be used to a large extent independently; search engines customize any query upon user habits (which means, paradoxically, that two different users get different results for the same query). Some rules in the web, such as the so-called “power law”, show that in fact links seems to be concentrated around a limited number of nodes. In short, if hypertext is increasingly open, its reading cannot open beyond a certain limit. Internet studies tend to show that most of the users tend to follow surfing paths in order to simplify and to reduce uncertainty. In short, even though the web is increasingly entropic, there are in fact forces which tend to storage and put order, and therefore hypertext are taking more typical forms of classic texts.

Digital image Intertextuality involves an integration between written text, sound and image. The notion of metamedium that we can apply to the computer and to the web, becomes especially useful, because the web has allowed an integration between various communication languages, which are becoming increasingly connected, no longer distinguished in their use. But this, especially with regard to image, is in fact the third impact of digitization upon media.

The eighties, named “the digital decade” (Ghersel 1990), were a crucial period in Computer Graphics (i.e. for production/processing of images using specific software and hardware). Some theorists stressed the fundamental otherness of these new images (Youngblood 1970): others, vice versa, stressed continuity with regard to analog technologies, and even to drawing (Couchot 1988a, Colombo 1990). However everyone was commonly amazed by these computer-generated images that – even though initially frankly rudimental - came gradually to fully simulate photographic images and to be integrated with them. From the beginning computers were programmed to create images out of nothing. Afterwards, almost coinciding with the acquisition and renewal of Pixar by Jobs, and thanks to the genius of John Lasseter, computer animation ceased to be a simple exhibition of the potential of hardware and software, to be gradually integrated into film and television production. In the same years, studies about Virtual Reality ( i.e. systems in which user could interact with images wearing special interfaces as datagloves, datasuites, helmets) developed. These experiments aimed to be especially useful to train particular skills (as in the case of the flight), but the development of easiest and less expensive devices favored their integration with video game interfaces. Wii system launched by Sony, for example (wireless joystick, live interaction with objects in the screen) seem to be the evolution of Electronic Mandala (1989) of the Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici (Young Men Social Mechanics), a group of avant-garde artists of those years. Computer graphics had a strong impact upon photography. In the Timeline, we have seen the market launch of the first digital camera by Sony. After that, digital photo has gradually replaced the traditional analog photos, and - even deeper - the picture itself has ceased to be for consumers only a fragment of personal memory, to become an easily exchangeable object. Already in the nineties the diffusion of digital mobile phones, equipped with micro-cameras, allowed to integrate photography in everyday communication (Colombo, Scifo 2005). This integration has been carried through by Web 2.0 and by its increasing uploading and sharing of contents by every user, as is evident in historical social media such as Flickr. Some platforms-applications, such as Instagram, explicitly evoke the history of photography in the process of digitalization: photos in Instagram are in fact inspired by Polaroid, and are easily shared in social networks.

2.2 The sense of cultural convergence

As media needs to observed both in their technological but even social features, we can imagine that digital convergence is accompanied by a slow cultural transformation. I would like to suggest here “synthetic”, as a distinguishing feature of social life in our era.

Why do we need to talk about “synthetic communication”? The term has multiple meanings, and suggests different interpretations. The first meaning is that of simplicity, and as a result of speed. There is no doubt that digitization has been accepted as a paradigm entailing speed as a value. At the origins of computerization, interactivity, as an essential feature of any digital change, was defined precisely in terms of speed. The basic idea was that a successful interaction had to reproduce the timing of a human interaction and therefore to be the fastest possible. Now, we all know that timing of a conversation are not rigid, that any speech pause can be important as any spoken sentences. Therefore to make comparison with face-to-face interaction to justify any speed in the interactions was at least bizarre. According to Paul Virilio, Western society seemed to be obsessed by “dromology” (Virilio 1984), as speed appeared as synonymous of efficiency and effectiveness became a determining criterion to evaluate actions. In the specific case

of interactivity, this growing machine speed depends upon this “dromologic obsession” than the imitation of human speed. On the contrary, our waiting times (navigation, search, response) are largely influenced by a merely technical interaction, so that our “patience” in waiting is progressively decreased, even though connection speeds are increasing thanks to broadband and processors are increasingly efficient. The acceleration of communication processes therefore determines a different “feeling of interaction” and presumably is able to alter actions and passions such as travelling, sending a message, distance and nostalgia. If everything is faster, time in social life undergoes a paradoxical process of contraction-expansion: contraction, thanks to time reduction in communication process and expansion, for non-technological time stretching. Even cultural production seems to be affected by this trend. Emphasis is often optimistically given to new opportunities offered by creative democracy in social media, which allow everyone to create and distribute digital content, or to participate to crowd-creation on the web. However it is not taken into account that all this production works in a paradigm of urgency and haste: first chats and first email boxes have already led to the use of an immediate writing combined to the use of emoticons, hence hybridizing oral and written communication. Since the beginning of the nineties, the development of digital mobile phones began to allow to send short messages, (i.e. to be contained in a character-limit). An heavy, continuous and often very creative use of writing has replaced verbal communication. Blogging, social networking and micro-blogging did not substantially altered, but rather further spread these practices. In a blog post, texts need to be shortened in order to take into account diverse reading processes. Facebook explicitly invites to write short and essential sentences, Twitter contains information provided by users in a very small character limit, even smaller than that of SMS. The Hawaiian term wiki refers to speed and haste. In fact, as we will remember later, the speed of writing indicates both the ease of writing, as well as the necessity to speak quickly, as quickly as possible to fill the silences and gaps: a crucial point, which means the saturation of the speech, rather more than the artisan care of creative work.

A second meaning of “synthetic” is that of organized integration, able to create something new. From this point of view, digital convergence allows new forms of use, guided by multitasking models and by original forms of communication converging into a single source. From a desktop computer or from a mobile device we can search, read a newspaper, watch TV, listen to the radio, socialize with friends, post to a blog and so on. And,

if there is a digital “language”, this is made up by a mixture (or a synthesis) of written and oral, symbolic and iconic, of visual and sound. As already mentioned, this synthetic feature is made possible by hypertext structure, but perhaps it is worth noting here that this new synthetic language requires a special literacy. Indeed, none of the components of digital is quite new. Word and image were already mixed up in comics (and well before in its historical precursors) and in silent movies, in film and television, and so on. But a new linguistic synthesis is combined with a synthesis of devices and requires new intellectual habits.

Form this point of view, neuroscientists (Wolf 2007) point out that the brain areas activated by the use of computer are different from those activated by reading: again, a kind of synthesis between the areas activated by symbolic-alphabetic and ideographic languages. These areas have not been this way but that have been activated by any invention which made them necessary. In other words we were not born to read as well as we were not born to use the computer, but, in either case, we are adapting ourselves - as a species – to our own invention. Our digital world enables us to do many things together: we can talk with different people together without getting confused, even though devices, tools and languages are always the same. Moreover, the fact that we use many tools together does not necessarily mean that we do more things: email, Facebook, and a search engine may well be part of a unified strategy of promotion of a book or of another type of product. The notion of “synthetic” and of “synthesis” in this sense means that we can use, historically different languages, which have now given rise to entirely new semiotic and aesthetic forms. This explains why young people tend easily to adapt in this synthesis, in which they are immersed as field of literacy, while those, who are used to more differentiated and less integrated languages, need to get used to this synthesis. In short, the distinction between “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” (Ferri 2011) is both interesting and a bit misleading: interesting because it tries to explain different constructions of literacy in two age groups; misleading because “the immigrants” are by no means coming from far away, but on the contrary they have in their roots substantial parts of these new forms of expression. A dialogue between these two groups enriches probably much more than a simple assimilation of older people from the younger.

Then there is a third meaning of “synthetic”: as a synonym of “artificial” as opposed to “natural”. From this point of view, digital technologies do not pose different problems from those posed by more traditional mechanical and analog technologies. All devices have always been artificial “implants” of human potentials. However, in the digital world there is something more: a distinctive feature of synthetic devices is in fact a superficial imitation of natural devices. Imitation is not limited to a simple functional replacement, but goes so far as to aspects of perceptive similarity. In other words, a synthetic fabric is not limited to performing the same function of a yarn woven with natural materials, but must also appear as the latter, at least in some respect. What is synthetic is always a little the same of what it is replacing. Of course, old media can also be in some way synthetic: press can be considered a synthetic writing, cinema a synthetic theater. However digital devices add to these other distinctive features: they tend to simulate not only the “passive” effects of experience (as perspective view or surround sound effect), but also “active” ones, thus putting the user in a position to interact with systems of various kinds obtaining certain types of results. Interactivity, in this sense, is crucial: to interact with someone for a Skype phone call means to be neither present nor absent one from another. It is, in fact, a synthetic presence, reminding in some features to a face-to-face conversation. To handle a joystick enables to perform actions that simulate real actions and resemble them, often effectively. We often perform “syntethic actions”.

Digital devices are clearly “synthetic”. In digital cameras there is no shutter, but shutter sound remains, not only to make public the act of the photographer (to protect the privacy of the photographed), but also to remember that it is anyway a photography . For the same reason, some recent devices maintain a retro design. Or in Youtube we can select videos by pressing old VCR

buttons. In some ways those synthetic digital devices express a kind of nostalgia for those they replaced.

3 Global Network: cultures and markets

Social media society has been authoritatively defined by Castells as “network society”:

A network society is a society whose social structure is made around networks activated by microelectronics-based, digitally processed information and communication technologies. I understand social structures to be the organizational arrangements of humans in relationships of production, consumption, reproduction, experience, and power expressed in meaningful communication coded by culture (Castells 2009, p. 24).

In all his work, Castells has always been focused upon the role of Internet (as a network of networks) as the “backbone” of human, social, political and economic relations. The network society should, according to the Catalan scholar, develop thanks to several events occurred since the seventies. The theorists of the network society argue that contemporary social, political and economic practices, institutions and relationships are now organized through and around network structures (Barney, 2004).

Besides this network is different from other networks, such as road infrastructure, water or gas distribution systems, but also radio or television, both for its peculiar articulation around nodes connected to each other, and for the double circulation of contents along the links. In other words, networks of the “network society” are characterized by many-to-many communication (and not one-to-many as in traditional broadcasting) and therefore can be dialogical. Moreover networks in the network society tend to be global.

The term does not have to be misunderstood. In fact, networks are not equally distributed: they reach some areas more than others, enable some people more than others, and essentially replicate forms of diversity and inequality, and sometimes create new ones. However, they tend, by their nature, to be transnational, hence not containable within national borders: some big brands dominate the world (including the digital world), many important political decisions transcend local governments (e.g. European Union) and cultural and symbolic circulation continuously goes beyond the linguistic and geopolitical borders. Nevertheless globalization is not only a contemporary process, but instead has often happened in human history (e.g. Hellenism, the Roman Empire, the great Christian and Islamic cultural areas, colonialism, even the Cold War). However, globalization that we live today has key features, that Tomlinson defines as: Globalization as complex connectivity referring to the rapidly developing and ever more complex network of interconnections and interdependencies that characterize modern social life. (Tomlinson 1999, pp. 1-2). So we could argue that globalization and networks are closely intertwined, even though they cannot be reduced into one another. In particular, it should be clear that network does not create any new space, but it is included within any space we cross in our daily lives. This assumption is in contrast with science fiction literature, which developed in the eighties, which had as protagonists Sterling and Gibson (the so-called Cyberpunk), and which dealt with the electronic communication in terms of Cyberspace.

The term had several meanings: some relating to the nature of electronic technology and some to developments in Western societies in the era of “Turing man” (Bolter 1984). Cyber-prefix is however still used, when it comes to the web, as shown by some recent works (Spadaro 2012).

We could now ask a question: do social media shape the space? Do they build a communication? Or do they cancel any space making our experience everywhere?

Before the turn of the millennium, several authors (Toffler 1986, Gates 1995, Negroponte 1995, Meyrowitz 1985) worked on the relationship between space and media, arguing that electronic media such as radio and television altered the previous spatial constraints (both in terms of social position and of physical location), up to lead to cancel the sense of place. For the first prophets and visionaries of the web, especially for those influenced by cyberpunk, physical space passed through a cybernetic duplication, hence a kind of simulated territory in which formally similar experiences to the real ones could be lived. The best outcome of that reflection is perhaps brothers Wachowsky’s film trilogy, Matrix (1999-2003), which can be considered the essence of this school of thought. The concept just expressed is perfectly suited to one of the meanings we have given to the notion of “synthetic”, and in particular to the idea of “surrogate”. Virtual space would imitate reality, and therefore would create a parallel experience.

However, with the advent of web 2.0, the debate has been changing. For instance in Moores’s essay (2012) a comprehensive review of the dualism between real space and virtual space of communication and an interpretive model able to explain the continuous intersection between different levels in everyday life can be found. After all, today geolocation and so-called locative media integrate communicative space and real space, making the viability of the second easier by reading and orienteering the first: GPS ever more integrated in our mobile phones, apps allowing to take a guided tour in a museum, ads that can reach the consumer in any place, platforms like Foursquare that localize user presence in an area and allow friends and acquaintances to meet up. In this case the notion of synthetic also means association, integration between two spaces (communicative and real), and multiplies the complexity of our perception of the world.

Attempts to display the network topologically show the complexity of the definition of space of networks. One example can be Crang’s geography (1998) as “inside people head”. It is a imaginative geography, made by people, but also by scholars committed to interpret it. Our current imaginative geography seems to be based on two axes: firstly, space as space of relations. We could define it as the space of “immobile socialization” (Bakardjieva 2003 and 2005). It is a virtual space, which however in our reflexive perception is linked to actual relations: either in friendship networks (Henderson & Gilding 2004), or networks between colleagues (in which the size space binds tightly to the physical territory). Secondly, the connections between this virtual space and our physical space. Think about those maps that show how bloggers are spread in large metropolitan city. Or think about Facebook maps that show places we visited. In these cases the real space is symbolized by a geographic map (a Google map, for example), or by a topological scheme (for example metro stations). Web users, bloggers, Facebook users, etc. contribute to show their presence in these maps: a mixture of

representations indicating precisely the ambiguity of our space representation, of our subjective geography.

At the same time it is not easy to represent the network: diagrams can be used. These diagrams relate to the abstract structure, to geometric nodes connected, as happened in the well-known and hand-drawn schema of the ARPANET network, but also in the sophisticated representations of cyber-geography, which represent bonds and hyperlinks between the various nodes of the network as in a complex web. What I would like to suggest here is that the difficulty depends not only on the complexity of our subjective experiences, but also on the basic misunderstanding when talking about the “space” of the web. In fact, the web is not a space, (it is, of course, its infrastructure, but this is not the experience that we do, nor is this that enables various types of relationships) but a context in the sense that communication scholars give to the term. A context is a coded communicative situation, in which subjects in relations interact. A discursive context does not need space, though often the communicative relationship takes place in space. When we read a book, for example, the context is similar even though we are in different cities. The same happens in a research or a consultation, a chat, a comment, a purchase and a bank transfer: all these actions happen at home, at work, in bus, on holidays.

In spite of many spatial metaphors we use (the medium as environment, web users as its inhabitants: Giaccardi 2010), the web is not a space, but a set of relational contexts. Social media does not have a place, even if they are everywhere, as their users. But it is human ubiquity which generates web globalization, and not vice versa.

4 Sociality: sociability and power This is probably the crucial point to analyze social media, which is apparently implied in their name: their social aspect. Media are obviously always social, as part of a society in which they intermediate (Colombo 2003). However the adjective takes on a special meaning, when talking about media in digital convergence. We have already seen Tim Berners-Lee’s deep awareness of the web as a social innovation, and not only technological innovation. Many technological disciplines have applied the same perspective, as the so-called Social Informatics, (study of the social aspects of computerization and ICT), whose main features regard that of problem solving in computing in the specific context of application, of attention given to institutional and cultural dimension, of integration between technological and social design (Bennato 2012). The same can be said about Computer Supported Social Networks (e.g. Wellman’s work), which distinguish between virtual communities, computer networks in work team and telework or Social Software by Clay Shirky (2002), which gave rise to platforms such as MySpace and Flickr. Not surprisingly, digital technologies and their applications have been a privileged object of study in theories of so-called Social Shaping of Technology, which have been focused on the processes of domestication, of integration of a technology in social life (Silverstone 2006).

The emphasis to the “social” referring to the media of digital convergence is probably very simple: they seem in fact designed to enable participatory collaborations and horizontal, grass-roots communications instead of traditional (usually vertical, and top-down)organizational mechanisms. Social media appear immediately as a tool for rethinking of traditional patterns of decision making, management and innovation, as in the Cluetrain Manifesto, which in 1999 was an attempt to redefine the markets on the basis of the impact of the web in corporate communication. In short, it seems pretty clear that the web (or Web 2.0, or the participative web, just to evoke the wide range of expressions used to describe the phenomenon we are talking about), allows us to exchange ideas, opinions, interests, passions, values, thus creating a medium (articulated today in blogs, wikis, SNSs) in which “la caratteristica più evidente sono le persone” (Bennato 2011, p. IX) (translated by the reviewer “the most striking feature are people”). Is it so obvious? Of course, there are no doubts if we look at the development of Wikipedia, or at the democratic and political use of SNSs. When Manuel Castells speaks of “self mass communication” (Castells, 2009), he seems to recognize the crucial role played by users in social media; or of “social casting” (in reference to the way of broadcasting which is peculiar to social or participatory web) and insists on their collaborative nature. However it should not be simplified. At first all the implications of the term “social” should be taken into account. Curiously, it does not address the complexity of society, but one of its dimensions, what Simmel (Simmel 1910) defines “sociability”, which is typical of friendship, of gossip. Simmel’s sociability - occasionally rightly related to the web and to social media – refers to human pleasure of being together without certain functional objectives and outside a political or production context. Peter Dahlgren defines the widespread attitude of friendly chats in the web as “talkative society”(Dahlgren 2009). In fact, nonstop connections, SNSs participation, content production and distribution, or even just frequent contacts with friends, seem to increase our sociable attitude. It’s a such a strong attitude that some are concerned with stress and tension that such full of relationships and communication life can generate. John Freeman writes for example: This is not a sustainable way to live. This lifestyle of being constantly on causes emotional and physical burnout, work-place meltdowns, and unhappiness. How many of our most joyful memories have been created in front of a screen? Yet in 2006, it was discovered that Americans spent more than half of their life connected to various forms of media. This means we spend more time engaged in media than we do sleeping, more hours plugged in than we log at work. We work in order to have time to watch. We spend more time with our computers than our spouses. We check e-mail more often than we drink water. (Freeman 2009, p. 196). But the point is not only to take into account this excessive sociability, but rather to be aware that social complexity also implies inequalities, conflicting interests, power relations, even in social media as part of social life. From this point of view, it is also crucial to point out that social media imply some contradictions. 4.1 A sociable market? Let’s start by considering the economic dimension, which basically constitutes a determining factor. Since military and political authorities in U.S. decided to leave ARPANET to the free market, the

crucial role played by economic competition in developing the web became clear. In the same way, New Economy, with its utopias and its misunderstandings, demonstrates the very close link between business competition and technological innovation that underpins collaborative web. It has been frequently pointed out (e.g. Formenti 2011) that production is not resistant to capitalism and to its contradictions. At first, there is exploitation of labor. I am not talking only about child labor in particular areas of the world (controversies surrounding exploitations of this type also affect a market leader like Apple), but also about exploitation in consumption (Scholtz 2013). Our content creation and sharing, with free satisfaction and enjoyable sociability, produces traffic that increases the profits of telecommunication companies, search engines and platforms, and advertisement revenues. Also in the web we can experience the so-called “McDonaldization of the world” (Ritzer 2011), i.e. cost savings for the company (with the assignment of tasks to consumers that should be done by any salaried worker such as to set and to clear the table, and so on) can become a competitive advantage typically advertised in terms of customer care. In the same way, in fact, social media users produce free content that allow companies to earn revenues, by encouraging the idea that productive effort is rewarded with creative satisfaction. Curiously, user free labor is not usually connected to the controversy on copyright and intellectual property. Indeed, the latter issue shows very clearly the contrast between two logics of economic articulation in cultural production. The “free” logic, which belongs to large content platforms, is in contrast with the traditional “owned” logic in cultural industry. Since users do not only produce on their own, but mostly reorganize, cut out and reassemble into a continuous “mash-up”, traditional cultural industries (discography, film, television, press, and so on ), traditional publishers and broadcasters are claiming content ownership, by invoking mechanism for copyright protection developed in the nineteenth century. A long series of legal actions against those allowing sharing, such as Napster, Megavideo and Gigapedia, show how the struggle against peer-to-peer (Comi 2007) is crucial today in capitalism (Hesmondhalgh 2010, Gill & Pratt 2008, McChesney 2013). As shown by Lessig (2004, 2008), this logic is contradictory, and it is still lacking of recognizing the value of professional cultural production. It is true that file sharing, as long as it is part of socializing, appears hard to be punished; but it is also true that user’s unawareness of the problem of financing professional cultural production goes hand in hand with the underestimation of the economic value of the user’s productivity, often mistaken for a simple form of consumption. Capitalism in the internet shows constantly its aggressive nature. The history of participatory web is in fact full of takeovers and of monopoly-oligopoly. There have been takeovers of potential competitors companies (such as Youtube in the case of Google): young startup companies often want corporate takeovers, to raise money, once launched their innovative and successful idea. This logic can be found outside and inside the web, with strong competition between parties and services involved. As in this case, power law is harshly represented by Barabasi in the following tables:

Table 1: Casual distribution and power law distribution

Source: http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2007/05/the_power_of_po.html in Barabasi (2002). In fact, the celebrated web democracy does not exist. What exists is instead an oligopoly of attention, of contacts and of value accumulation that implies that the strong gets stronger and the weak weaker. Power law has also been called “Matthew’s law” referring to the words of Christ in Matthew’s Gospel (Mt 25: 29): “For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them”, even though the reference is completely beside the point. The speech of Christ is part of the parable of the talents, and calls each one to profit of his-her talents. Those who will profit of them, will be rewarded by God. Power law is exactly the opposite, and refers to the mechanism of capitalist accumulation, as already described by Marx. In this neo-capitalist environment, closely linked to global finance, (even today, in spite of New Economy bubble in 2000), the real question is to ask: where is the exchanged value? (Colombo, Cuman 2012). Castells writes: In sum: the old question of industrial society – indeed, the cornerstone of classical political economy – namely, “what is value?,” has no definite answer in the global network society. Value is what is processed in every dominant network at every time in every space according to the hierarchy programmed in the network by the actors acting upon the network. (Castells 2009, p. 25). Another problem concerns, of course, the particular nature of information as commodity, as sensible and personal data that many companies (and nations) own about lives and behaviors of citizens and consumers. 4.2 Public, political Even from a political point of view, social media tend to collide with divided but also connected tendencies in politics and with its naturally conflicting, cooperative or competitive forces. There is a wide literature concerning neo-liberalistic roots in our social life today. The above-mentioned Dahlgren points out that neo-liberal thought has gradually eroded the very roots of democracy. On one hand, market is regarded as the only public arena, and the language of economics as the only social meta-knowledge, able to translate and to understand all other

languages of knowledge. On the other hand, individual consumption is perceived as a form of social life having the upper hand on the others. Literature on this issue is rather broad, i.e. the beautiful book by Nick Couldry (2010), with a detailed debate about the historical roots of neoliberalism and its rooting in contemporary society. It is a traditional form of ideology, which slowly but definitely undermines the roots of democracy as far as is known. For those who have doubts about the nature of some neo-liberalistic assumptions, I can, as a scholar, remember how forms of academic assessments both in Italy and more generally in Europe are deeply influenced by some “philosophies” that can be referred to economic and quantitative measurements, to individualistic and competitive (much more than cooperative) research perspectives, to complete underestimation of the importance of education, to the reduction of less quantifiable and less technologically and economically impacting disciplines, and so on. We must therefore reflect not so much on the current hegemony (in Gramscian terms) of the neo- liberalistic ideology, but rather on the mechanisms allowing it, and enabling it to become the dominant thought. In a well-known essay, Manin (1995) seems to compare mature democracies in the eighties-nineties to forms of communication such as broadcasting (audience democracy). Several political communication scholars have interpreted traditional broadcasting (even in the extreme forms of politainment) as a “political window” that allows monitoring citizen to follow and to judge politicians to whom citizen delegate. This perspective ends to bind the dominance of television as a medium since the turn of the early eighties to the primacy of delegative democracy. Is it really so? Should we then say that technologies and media that open the possibility of action (primarily of communication, but in the end even potentially of political action) will lead to the end of delegative democracy in favor of a new public sphere? From my point of view, any media form does not come first political processes, but is interwoven with them. I rather think that the ideological hegemony of neoliberalism has its strong roots: the central role played by the service sector, the production crisis, the progressive globalization, the fall of Berlin wall and the resulting end of two models of development, the crisis of traditional welfare policies and of Giddensian Third Way, the progressive left neoliberal policies (i.e. Tony Blair’s policies), in the direction of what some have called “the two rights” (Revelli 1996). These roots enable to underline how participative democracy is in fact under the threat of economic and techno centric neo-liberalism. Afterwards it must be said that web technologies are nothing without new cultural forms, which in fact are experienced (i.e. aggregations of people around ideas, protests, local identities, opposition to techno-political projects, so-called anti-political movements) but which are still moving - for now - in a context dominated by a single thought still exerting its hegemony.

The political role of digital media From this perspective, it is crucial to look at digital media, by assuming that the role of new over old media cannot be detached from the aforementioned hegemonic discourse: hence we are not supposed to grasp the essential differences between digital and analog media, between vertical and one-way broadcasting media and the interactive and web communication but rather to frame different chances that different media can offer citizen according to social constraints and opportunities. Let’s look at the Italian case. According to Dahlgren (2009), forms of web participation comprise those limitations on participation that this or that society can impose. For example in Italy, there are several limitations on participation and participatory culture: the discouraging national electoral system; the creation of what is journalistically called the “caste”; the construction of an oligopolistic television system which is basically stuck and unable to promote healthy competition and plurality of information. Each of these three elements is now being questioned. However participation requires an effort and a commitment that a more open system certainly would not require. We need to tackle here the core issue of national “divide”, meant as a limited web and broadband distribution and as the more traditional forms of exclusion. The issue of divide has been highly debated in an excellent existing literature (e.g. Bentivegna 2002). However, it is clear that this exclusion can take different forms depending on different ethos and policies in consumption choices and empowerment. Again, looking at data about children’s online use (Mascheroni 2012) it turns out that, in a certain age, children, whose parents have high cultural and social capitals, are using computers less (and with greater family involvement) than children, whose parents have low-cultural and social capitals. Here, a central role is played by what Silverstone (2006) called “moral economy”. Parents with poor (also digital) education, allow their children to use a computer and are more willing to buy a computer to give it to their children, because they want their children to be socially accepted. That shows again firstly a class-based and no-integrated development, but rather focused on technological diffusion, and secondly a paradoxical use of technology which must be differently judged in different contexts. Are we always confident that an heavy web use is better for a definition than a more careful use? Let’s now come back to more political and less ethical issues. It’s well known that there is an ongoing discussion between optimists and pessimists, between those promoting new digital skills and those criticizing their cultural impact. The larger debate is between Castells and Morozov, who differently question the ability of so-called “self-mass communication” to be really an element of democratization (Castells 2009, Morozov 2011). Dahlgren (2009) is, however, certainly right to emphasize the positive features of the web: if it is true that corporations such as Facebook and Google progressively undermine the privacy of the citizen, it is also true that there are signs of an effective political use in world freedom movements (such as those of the Arab Spring) and protest movements (Occupy, Indignados, Piraten, MoVimento 5 Stelle), and of a powerful relational and organizational role played in public opinion

and movements and in more traditional political parties and coalitions (with the role played by social media during the Italian local elections in 2011). Participation The work by Dahlgren (2009) is also useful as a starting point, to look at the links between the “talkative society” and democracy. Following Dahlfren, the publically talkative, chatting society is more likely to remain democratic than the muted one. On this point, which is the weakest and the crucial in his thought, I will come back later. Now I should point out conditions and limitations that the author himself puts to his thesis: In today’s media landscape, being able to put various communicative skills to new uses for civic participation takes on extra significant (…). As new affordances appear with increasing rapidity, new practices are generated. Skills can develop through practices, and in this process foster a sense of empowerment. Civic practices and skills help forge personal and social meaning to the ideals of democracy, and not least help in coalescing forms of civic identities. Analytically, a robust civic identity implies an empowered political agent, one equipped to confront structures of power. Engagement in issues becomes meaningful, citizens feel that they, in concert with others, can in some way make a difference, that they can have some kind of impact on political life, even if they do not win every battle. At some point, of course, empowerment must be experienced as resulting in concrete, objective results via participation; perpetually losing can engender a corrosive cynicism (Dahlgren 2011, p. 14). According to Dahlgren, success and failure of “civic practices” and of political participation do not depend on the independent variable of technological use, but rather (institutional, economic, cultural) conditions that enable web 2.0 and social media to develop can enhance or not their effectiveness. Let’s go to the point of a “talkative” society that is closer to democracy than a muted one. Apparently this is a cliché. However I would like to briefly reflect on the peculiarity of “talkative” in contemporary societies. Contemporary societies are as never before supported by technologies that enable communication and self-expression to be in our private/public everyday life (Gili, Colombo 2011). Of course, if we regard citizen as individual, applying therefore an individualistic and neo-liberal perspective, there is no doubt that the increasing possibility of expression and speech is an undoubted benefit. But if what is at stake is democracy as management of public good, things are much more complicated. I try to develop my argument. In taking into account Habermas’s birth of the public sphere (Habermas 1990), the processes of argumentation and dialogue are essential. In newspapers and cafes of bourgeois society, people can talk, argue, discuss about issues. Of course, we are talking about people belonging to elites, to a certain social class, and claiming a certain social role. In this sense the dialogue that gives birth to the public sphere is based on an implicit sharing of knowledge and a shared practice of argumentation. It’s pretty clear that the development of mass democracies might modify this initial framework: free speech is widespread and belonging to a bourgeois class becomes less significant. I stress this point because a talkative society is so thanks to increasing opportunities of communication, beyond the

public nature of such communication, even though these opportunities for self-expression would not surely result in a value in democratic terms. Therefore I doubt Dahlgren’s assumption, concerning the relation between talkative society and democracy, as well as I generally doubt that web 2.0 and social media, and their use, can be inherently more or less useful in the processes of democratization. We have mentioned that, according to Habermas, knowledge sharing and good argumentation are basic conditions in the construction of a public sphere. Let us then focus on the issues of knowledge and representation, which are extremely closely related. Representation is here understood as practice of construction of an icon (in the technical sense) of the world in which symbols, narratives, and implicit interpretations and social discourses allow citizen to know reality. I will not question here whether such representation must necessarily be taken as a pseudo-reality (after all, the wise Lippmann (1997) civilly assumed that in the early decades of the twentieth century): as a sociologist, I am used to think that our knowledge of the world in general consists of direct experience and mediated experience, and that either of them can be free from assumptions and biases generated by the discourses in which we are continuously immersed (Bautier 2012). I would rather suggest that in the web and in social media this representation changes, but not necessarily for the better or for the worse. For example, let’s consider disintermediation in journalism, with the explosion of citizen-journalism, wiki-gossip, and the increasing role played word of mouth. Who can really say that web user is inherently more informed than before, when news were mediated by the usual bottlenecks process of newsroom? Less intermediation means certainly less control, which implies not only less surveillance, but also less control, in the most positive sense of discipline and self-discipline. In short, citizen get more information, but there can be doubt concerning the quality of this information. I would say that honest professional journalists can guarantee better information than so many willing amateurs, as well as many wiki-journalists can give a more honest representation than a newsroom of journalists with political or economic interests. Let’s consider, again, the issue of diffusion of knowledge. Let’s think about Wikipedia, and its knowledge dissemination model. Are we confident that we should put the question of its contribution in terms of reliability and not rather in terms of the underlined rhetoric of knowledge, in the selection of topics, in the positive trust to cooperation and so on, comparing it with the rhetoric of modern encyclopedia? If we consider the very broad issue of the public sphere, the issue of knowledge becomes crucial, because it is obvious that in the public sphere by Habermas a good argumentation is not just a clever sophistic construction, but starts from an analysis and thus a good knowledge of reality. A good knowledge is therefore needed today to have a good participation and a good democracy, perhaps without illusions that social media and web 2.0 would automatically generate a good knowledge. Instead, let’s ask how intellectual elites develop, what role elites play, who are the clerics today, what is the real power of those who exercise and manage knowledge, what is the role played by traditional agencies, how cultural capital circulates and which relations maintain with other capitals. Complexity of the issue becomes now clear. Perhaps we would start to wonder what

are the foundations of agency in a context of today, without any illusion of having already good solutions. What happens if we start tackling the issue of good argumentation? We all know that the web, as the world, is inhabited by the best and the worst human communication. That means, for example, that in the web freedom of speech by itself does not guarantee that this right is exercised to give voice to positive instances and to the public interest. Even though neo-romantic rhetoric of expressiveness can turn in authentic expression “the self-express”, there are limits imposed by platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest conditioning their use; and even though a demagogic rhetoric can describe a blog as a purely expressive space, this is a context with peculiar rules. I would say it briefly (sometimes very briefly as in Twitter): to say continually something, to obsessively express yourself (which is part of a “talkative society”) are in themselves a good basis for a democratic life? I might suggest that such assumption implies, if not a radical doubt, at least a need to put into question and therefore a need to continue to reflect. 5 Human, Too Human. In conclusion, my suggestion is to adopt a critical and cautious approach to the enthusiasm aroused by social media. It is not about adopting a catastrophic or snobbish retrograde approach. It is rather about focusing not only on how this new sociability is better than the previous ones, but also on the specific forms this sociability takes, with its opportunities, its risks and its contradictions. We have started by drawing a Timeline, that shows the complex roots of social media in the long process of digitization and then we have tried to grasp more deeply the impact of digital convergence on writing, text and image, and more generally on our contemporary living. We have then shown that the definition of social media is deeply rooted in the notion of sociability, while suggesting that this dimension is and was one of the elements of social life. Taking into account this assumption, we have focused on contradictions between sociability and conflict in society, looking at two different but overlapping contexts: markets and politics. Finally, before turning to some empirical analysis and to more general interpretations, it is worth to summarize some possible results. First, we can recall the nature of social media as discursive contexts. They are all characterized by interface usability, by user’s active and productive role, by many-to-many communication and by the particular importance given to visibility and reputation. All these contexts take the shape of multiple conversations, even if they are not necessarily aimed at conversation (video posting is not in itself a conversational act, even if it is an act of communication, but Youtube is an irreversibly conversational platform) and yet each of these social media (blogs, social networking sites, and so on) has its own specificity, and within each category you can find different styles and shapes.

To consider social media as discursive contexts of conversational nature helps to solve many issues. It enables not only to reject some fascinating but misleading metaphors (such as those considering social media as environments, territories, places or spaces), but allows you to easily make a distinction between social media and other social actions that social media enable. And it is the case of economic action which consists in selling and buying, or of political action that implies participation, or the simple act of transmission of cultural traditions (such as the creation of multimedia archives or, of course, writing a Wiki encyclopedia). By definition, we can therefore highlight that there is a clear distinction between problems caused by technological interfaces (let’s say, by structural constraints and limits of the context influencing users and their speech) and problems related to the specific discourses. Issues arose by technological interfaces have to do with traditional socio-political issues: (usually uneven and partial) distribution of economic or political power, social and cultural capital. The link that we have already discussed with neoliberalism (Papacharissi connects it to the individualistic turn of the Sixties / Seventies: Papacharissi 2010) is immediately evident in oligopolistic tendencies, predominantly economic-centric models and functional use of powers. It is no coincidence that hackers work on crucial links between social networks and their powers, by undermining the apparently only technological bases of the web: open source calls into question ownership in digital technology that in fact enables concentration and monopoly; Wikileaks and Anonymous call into question transparency and opacity of a globalized society of power (Hardt, Negri 2002; Sifry 2011); platforms of digital democracy free themselves by constraints of traditional platforms (think of specific platforms such as Liquid Feedback, Adhocracy, Derev, but also the experiences of crowd-democracy, for example in Iceland and Brazil). Issues arose instead by conversations, and by their own rules, pose other problems: for example, the concept of identity, the private sphere, social articulation of time, and even the concept of human relationships (Dokoupil 2012). Even these issues, however, are not entirely immune to hegemonic ideologies. Are we so sure there are no links between visibility in SNSs and the old spectacular visibility perceived by Andy Warhol (the fifteen minutes of fame), and already there in the society of the spectacle described by Debord (Debord 1967; boyd 2012) and perfectly represented by the reality TV (Carpentier 2009)? Which idea of history underlies the energy that we put into our contribution to diffuse knowledge, perhaps constituting online archives? By collecting modern art to account for our history, do we work in a critical interpretation of history or do we increase mass nostalgia? And being in our sociable sphere, do we sometimes avoid conflicts and diversities, that homophile in the web allows us not to see? Or do we participate to build walls in our spontaneous and energetic verbal clashes which, although being conversations, have nothing to do with the difficult art of human dialogue? The problem, then, seems to be as follows: social media as discursive contexts embody signs of the society they belong to, with its inequalities, its conflicts and its heavy hegemonies. To adopt a communicational point of view allows us to test discourses, to identify weak points, to logically overcome contradictions. Both a very close look, able to compare individual cases and to

reveal clashes and a broader look, able to look at new hegemonies that digital discursive contexts enable, are needed. The sociability of social media and its pleasure can be so observed and understood in a different light, without being unaware of the need for ethical and political choices.

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