Small places turned inside-out : social networking in small communities

In smaller communities with small populations"”as opposed to large cities and metropolitan areas"”social life is characterized by a strong sense of mutual familiarity: people knowing (or at least knowing of) one another through extended families, work or vocational networks. This chapter argues that for such "small communities," social relations are relatively more intense and confined, and these dynamics play out in particular ways over uses of social media, where people both conform to norms, expectations and values which they share with others and express their individual opinions and aspirations at the same time, often through careful navigation of private and more public-facing platforms. The findings and illustrations for this chapter are based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, carried out by the authors as part of the Why We Post project, a cross-cultural, comparative study of social media in small towns worldwide conducted by nine anthropologists based at University College London.1 Between 2012 and 2014, McDonald, Nicolescu and Sinanan conducted their fieldwork in rural China, southeast Italy and Trinidad, respectively. All three places were towns that could be classed as "small communities," however the populations of these settlements varied: 20,000 inhabitants in the Italian site, 18,000 in the Trinidadian site and 6,000 in the Chinese site.