Farci, M., Rossi, L., Artieri, G. B., & Giglietto, F. (2017). Networked intimacy. Intimacy and friendship among Italian Facebook users. Information, Communication & Society. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1203970
Summary
This paper develops the concept of “networked intimacy” to describe how Italian Facebook users construct and sustain intimate relationships through public, collaborative practices rather than private self-disclosure. Drawing on 118 semi-structured interviews, the authors argue that intimacy on Facebook is not the confessional act of a narcissistic self but a relational achievement that depends on the cooperation of one’s friendship network. They identify five interlocking practices — showing rather than telling, sharing implicit content, tagging, expectation of mutual understanding, and liking — that together allow users to disclose intimately in public while restricting meaningful reception to targeted audiences. The concept reframes SNS intimacy as community-oriented and reconfigures, rather than dissolves, the public/private boundary.
Key Contributions
- Proposes networked intimacy as a theoretical framework synthesizing prior work on Facebook self-disclosure and intimacy.
- Identifies five collaborative disclosure practices, extending earlier accounts by adding tagging and liking to the repertoire.
- Provides empirical grounding from the Italian context, broadening SNS intimacy research beyond largely Anglo-American samples.
- Offers a counterpoint to narcissism-based critiques of social media (Turkle, Lasch, Bauman), reframing public intimacy as relational and community-forming.
- Bridges classical sociology of intimacy and friendship (Giddens, Jamieson, Pahl) with platform studies and affordance theory.
Methods
Qualitative study within a PRIN-funded national project (2013–2015). The authors conducted 118 semi-structured interviews (plus 2 pilot) with Italian Facebook users aged 13–54, recruited via guided snowball sampling from prior participants’ friend lists and stratified by age and gender to match national Facebook penetration. Interviews averaged 45 minutes, took place in participants’ homes with Facebook open on their own devices, and were audio-recorded and transcribed. Analysis followed Strauss and Corbin’s Grounded Theory (open, axial, selective coding) in Dedoose, reducing about 400 initial codes to broader conceptual categories.
Findings
- Participants’ central concern was managing visibility and avoiding undesired consequences of disclosure.
- Showing rather than telling: images and visual cues carry layered meanings legible only to intended audiences.
- Sharing implicit content: quotes, lyrics, and cryptic posts encode messages for select friends — akin to but distinct from social steganography.
- Tagging marks exclusive relational events publicly while directing content toward specific individuals.
- Expectation of mutual understanding: close friends are assumed to recognize targeted content without explicit cues, functioning as a tacit relational competence.
- Liking operates as a low-cost signal of proximity and “thinking of you,” sustaining intimacy with minimal effort.
- These practices produce ephemeral, semi-public symbolic spaces where intimate audiences are continually reconstituted.
- Users did not spontaneously link “intimacy” to Facebook but described practices fitting the concept once prompted.
Connections
No other papers under the current topics were supplied, so there are no verified sibling notes to link. Intellectually, the paper converses with work on networked publics and context collapse (boyd, Marwick), self-disclosure and privacy on SNS (Bazarova, Lambert), and the sociology of the pure relationship and personal communities (Giddens, Jamieson, Pahl) — but no wikilinks are asserted here.