In the digital age, physical closeness is not a vital condition for connections and the development of social relationships. In the past, people’s daily social life was determined by the contacts that the immediate space could offer. Social relationships, together with meetings in-person, were facilitated by the use of telephones and letters in particular for people living far apart. Certain elements of sociality adapt with the changes to society itself. Today, social relationships are influenced by the use of new media as they offer spaces where people can manage their social interactions. Following the idea that communities are based on social exchanges, a social networks perspective appears necessary to consider the new forms of socialisation within computer-mediated communication systems.
To contrast with the common belief of loss of community, Poster argued that the term ‘mediated’ needed to replace Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities’. Even if the term was coined specifically to talk about nationalism, Anderson’s theorisation has also been widely used in relation to an array of communities, such as the communities of interest mentioned earlier. Anderson’s idea of ‘imagined communities’ can be stretched to denote the fact that, on the Internet, social relationships and online communities are a constructed idea, not necessarily embedded in physical reality.
‘Imagined communities’ are not based on everyday face-to-face social interactions, rather on imagined connections created by people who feel themselves part of specific groups. Transforming the notion of ‘imagined communities’ into ‘mediated communities’, the idea of social relationships online might be translated into the concept of ‘mediated relationships’. Following this, the mediation allowed by social media platforms and smart mobile devices fosters the creation of new social ties and takes into account Poster’s notion of ‘mediation’ as a key factor for online social engagement.
Mediated social relationships can manifest online in various forms, and the use of images is one of those. Analysing the chronology of Instagram, there is a moment when the platform changed its original identity of mere photosharing application into a ‘different social network’, as many Instagram users define it. That moment occurred on 9 April 2012 when Facebook bought Instagram. It was speculated that the main motivation of such a purchase was because Instagram is a mobile application.
In fact, this partnership allowed Instagram users’ constant access to their Facebook friends and to have a cross-mediated social experience that visibly increased the practice of photosharing over both platforms. Indeed, photos could be shared on Instagram and Facebook simultaneously. This cross-platform photosharing helped modify the initial Instagram identity of a photosharing smart phone application into a different social network, which fostered the use of visual communication in creating and maintaining social interactions.
Networked Individualism: a New Paradigm of Social Communication
