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 collaboratively negotiate intimate disclosure in public, semi-visible ways that depend on the cooperation and interpretive competence of their friendship network. Drawing on 118 semi-structured interviews, the authors argue that intimacy on Facebook is neither a simple leakage of the private into the public nor a narcissistic performance, but a relational accomplishment held together by tacit codes shared with close ties. They identify five interlocking practices — showing rather than telling, sharing implicit content, tagging, expectation of mutual understanding, and liking — that together constitute a repertoire for managing visibility while reinforcing community-like bonds of friendship.
Key Contributions
- Proposes networked intimacy as a synthesizing framework for prior work on Facebook self-disclosure and privacy management.
- Extends existing typologies of collaborative disclosure by adding tagging and liking to the better-known practices of showing-not-telling and implicit content.
- Provides empirical grounding in the Italian context, broadening SNS intimacy research beyond Anglo-American samples.
- Reframes public intimacy as relational and community-oriented, pushing back against narcissism-centred readings (Turkle, Lasch, Bauman).
- Bridges classical sociological theories of friendship and the pure relationship (Giddens, Jamieson, Pahl) with platform-affordance and networked-publics scholarship (boyd, Marwick).
Methods
Qualitative study, part of a multi-year PRIN-funded national project (2013–2015) with four Italian research units. 118 semi-structured interviews (plus 2 pilot) conducted in 2013 with users aged 13–54, sampled via guided snowball from each previous participant’s Facebook contacts, with age and gender quotas matching Italian Facebook penetration. Interviews (~45 min) were held in participants’ homes while they browsed their own profiles, then transcribed and analyzed in Dedoose using Strauss and Corbin’s three-stage Grounded Theory coding (open, axial, selective), moving from ~400 initial codes to higher-order categories.
Findings
- Users’ dominant concern is managing visibility and avoiding unintended audiences while still communicating intimately.
- Showing rather than telling: images and visual cues carry layered meanings legible only to targeted viewers.
- Sharing implicit content: quotes, lyrics, and cryptic posts encode messages for specific friends — adjacent to but distinct from social steganography.
- Tagging publicly marks exclusive relational events and directs content to particular ties while keeping posts broadly visible.
- Expectation of mutual understanding: close friends are assumed to decode targeted content without explicit cues — a tacit relational competence.
- Liking works as a low-cost signal of proximity and “thinking of you,” sustaining intimacy with minimal effort.
- Together these practices produce ephemeral, semi-public symbolic spaces where intimate audiences are continually reassembled.
- Notably, participants did not spontaneously link the word “intimacy” with Facebook, yet readily described practices fitting the concept once prompted.
Connections
No other papers under shared topics were provided, so there are no internal wikilinks to make here. Intellectually, the paper sits at the junction of sociology of intimacy (Giddens, Jamieson) and networked-publics research (boyd, Marwick), and would connect productively to future register entries on social steganography, context collapse, and platform-specific disclosure practices.