Italian Undergraduates Join Facebook, but Keep a Critical Distance: “It is Useless, but I’m Using It”

Study Background

Following boyd and Ellison, we can define social network sites (SNS) as ‘web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system’ (boyd and Ellison, 2008, 211). Among the many different SNS, Facebook is one of the most popular worldwide and one of the fastest growing sites in the history of the Internet (Fowler, 2012). The popularity of this social network seems to be particularly high among university students (Petrovic et al., 2012). Empirical evidence shows how Facebook is also adopted by perspectives university students as a way of introducing themselves into the university world (Madge et al., 2009). For incoming freshmen who have to face a completely new context, Facebook is ‘situationally relevant’ (Stutzman, 2011), as it provides a unique opportunity to keep the contacts with old friends and parents while at the same time entering into University life by getting in touch with other people, finding information about social events and, more in general, enriching and facilitating the socialization process (Madge et al., 2009).