Media and commercial culture in Facebook: the design of everyday life

Pasquali, F. (2011). Media and commercial culture in Facebook: the design of everyday life . Zagreb conference: "New challenges and methodological innovations in European media audience research". 7-9 April 2011.

Abstract: Starting from a set of empirical researches (based on online ethnographies, biographical self-accounts, and qualitative interviews) conducted since 2009 on college students’ Facebook use, the proposed paper examines the relationship between media consumption activities (e.g. media content quoting and sharing) and references to material consumption (e.g. brands quoting, etc.) in Facebook: a mix that builds a symbolic sphere (relying on the integration of different technological infrastructures) in which and by which the subject performs his/her identity and sociability. The empirical focus of the paper is on how media and commercial culture in Facebook become a tool kit for the expression of personal tastes, interests, passions, emotions and dislikes. Also, such tool kit provides networkers with functional resources for maintaining both strong and weak social ties, and as a means to differentiate in the apparently seamless horizontality of social ties in social networking sites. Social ties are in fact accurately organized and managed in order to integrate relations from different spheres of the subject’s existence’ spheres whose difference may be related to various orders of relationship such as work, family, friends, or to other phases of one’s biography. Starting from these aspects, the paper proposes a theoretical reflection on the category of ‘design’ as an emerging interpretative category in the understanding of subjects’ performances in social networking sites.