Social representation “of” social media among Romanian teenagers: investigating the negotiation of national and supra-national identity in the process of European integration through the “associative network technique”

Social media and European Union have gained tremendous power in the last two decades, and they have undoubtedly brought major changes in societies, so that the individuals face significant new aspects, especially in terms of identity negotiation. Given the political and the digital contexts, one of the best cases for studying these changes is the case of Romania, where the process of European integration and the huge spread of social media went side by side from the beginning (mid-2000s), thus creating a special framework for the negotiation of the national identity and the supranational identity. The study aims to explore empirically the interconnected relationship between “self” - “social media” - “European Union” - “Romania”. It is necessary to have a general framework generated by this relationship, in order to capture as many elements as possible referring to the impact of the two identities on an individual, in relation to the society. Because the impact is better felt in the young population, the sample is made of 124 Romanian teenagers, who represent the first Romanian generations that are grown up digital and European. Thus, the study participants were born with social media “in their hands” and they received the European citizenship in 2007, with Romania's accession to the European Union. To better understand these two aspects, the participants are between 13 and 19 years old and have been selected from high school classes (IX-XII), but also from gymnasium classes (V-VIII). The relationships between “self” – “social media” – “European Union” – “Romania” have been investigated by applying the “associative network technique” [1], [2] with four stimuli, each related to one of the four elements. This is a very efficient technique that requires the participant to write all the words that come to his mind in relation to the stimulus, indicating at the same time the rank of importance for each word elicited, and whether it has a positive, negative or neutral meaning. In this way they were obtained different associations for detecting the structure, contents, polarity, neutrality and stereotyping indexes of each semantic field. The technique was applied in 2019 and the related database was analyzed with T-Lab 2019 version 4.1.1.4, starting from the lemmatization process and continuing with the correspondence analysis and the cluster analysis. Comparing all four semantic fields, the results show that social media plays an important role for connecting the European Union and Romania, and therefore social media should not be underestimated in the negotiation of multiple identities. Moreover, our empirical results show that there is a perfect symbiosis between social media and the individual, which makes us say that social media is a very favorable environment in which teenagers can manifest themselves and where they can find answers to some of their most important social needs. Among all the connections explored between “self” – “social media” – “European Union” – “Romania”, the most important outcome is that in the representations of Romanian teenagers, social media positively influences the European integration of Romania, helping to shape a largely positive European identity, while the Romanian national identity is perceived mostly as negative.