No more birthday greetings on my Facebook wall, please. User representations of different social media platforms and their integration in everyday relational patterns

Existing literature on technology-mediated social relations, and especially on social network sites (SNS), has mainly adopted a platform-centric approach. For a better understanding of technology-supported social relations, however, an accurate knowledge of specific platforms should be integrated with an ecological perspective (see Jenkins et al., 2009). Following the networked individualism (Wellman, 2004) and the networked sociability (Castells et al., 2007) approaches, the new patterns of sociability seem to be built on me-centred networks (Rainie & Wellman, 2012). Adopting an ecological approach, our research focuses on the (networked) individual and on his/her social relations, considering the whole spectrum of platforms where he/she interacts with others, managing relational patterns and identity performances. In order to explore such an approach, we have chosen a set of qualitative methods, realizing 4 focus groups and 20 in-depth interviews with young italian people (age 18-26). Our research questions are the following: do young people have a precise representation (ideology) of the peculiarities of different digital platforms? Do they perceive some platform as more appropriated for specific tasks, contexts, relational patterns? Considering a specific platform (e.g. Facebook) are there communicative practices (tools, actions, etc.) that are perceived as more intimate than others? How are such representations built and shared among their peer-groups? How do they verbalize their representations of different platforms and the motivations for such perceived differences? Results show that young people both follow group-specific norms and more individualized usage patterns. All of our respondents, however, show to have a clear picture of what can be defined as an appropriate use of digital technology in relation to specific purposes, contexts, tie strength, etc. Among the dimensions that have been used to motivate such perceived differences: publicity, communicative bandwidth, synchrony vs asynchrony, investment in terms of time and money, etc. Moreover, even younger people seem to tribute a high emotional value to face-to-face interaction, often opposing a critical distance (at least in terms of self-representation) towards SNS. In our opinion, the relevance of our contribution relies on the fact that specific norms and usage patterns appear to organize user choices when interacting with friends and family (also) through social media. Shared usage norms appear as a dynamic and constantly negotiated process: what our respondents used to perceive as an appropriate behavior in the past (e.g. Birthday greetings on close friends' Facebook walls) is no longer accepted as legitimate.