Relazioni sociali, privacy e logiche di scambio

One of the crucial issue in the debate over the digital platform lies in the actual name of social network sites or SNS (an acronym shared and agreed upon worldwide). The reference to social network, that is to say weaving of relationships inside which the daily life of people partially takes place, brings into play one of the most important dynamics of sociality, i.e. the difficult balance between concealing and showing information about one’s personal life, the pertinence of choices and the consequent decisions and actions which this entails. For many years the problem of privacy has been a theme discussed in many disciplinary compartments: from the legal environment to social psychology, to the strictly sociological field and at the same time it has given rise to much empirical research on social media users and their attitude and behavior towards privacy. As in many other scientific debates on the internet and its applicative and communicative variations, the theme of privacy has been handled, by underlying some aspects of SNS and the activities users have on it. In this way the definition of online privacy has been enriched and reformulated so as to take into account certain peculiarities of the digital context. At the same time, even the interpretation of users’ behavior with respect to the protection of personal data, often defined as «paradoxical» has been motivated, bearing in mind the complexity of current online «social» practices. This evolution has also been accompanied by the re-definition of network social space (with a special reference to Facebook) and its statute. This essay aims to untangle the debate and help develop current discussion. It is a contribution which proposes to analyze the problem from the point of view of culture and users’ perception, and not from the technology, software and policies point of view (which is a necessary and complementary view).