Social media studies. I social media alla soglia della maturità: storia, teorie e temi.

[Autom. eng. transl.] Social media has reached the threshold of maturity. In the first twenty years of their history their number has increased, the communication models have changed and new economic structures have arisen. Social media today are naturalized and are perceived as a foregone aspect of everyday experience and culture. For almost three billion people in the world. Through various platforms they communicate: ordinary people, institutions, associations, companies. Their range of action is no longer limited to interpersonal relationships (public or private), but comes to touch important social processes, such as the representation of reality, the circulation of information or communication between generations. The volume aims to contribute to the understanding of social media at the threshold of maturity, describing in the first part twenty years of history, with particular attention to technological, communicative and cultural evolution. The historical reconstruction also includes a comparison between the different phases of study and their intertwining with social and media discourses. The second part is dedicated to three junctions of the debate: the representation of reality - social media are now an important tool for disseminating stories (real and false), but they are also the place where narratives are collectively constructed in conversations between users ; the relationship between what is private and what is public - social media brings the very definition into play, together with that of the forms of control over the boundaries of our privacy; intergenerational use - social media can no longer be, to paraphrase the title of a film, a country for young people, rather a multigenerational environment. They contribute to the formation of the younger generations and are interpreted and used in a different way by the less young, who apply the models of communication to them most familiar to them. Moving from history to current events, from the overall picture to the deepening, the volume aims to describe a phase of development of social media in which, no longer new, they have become part of the culture of those who use them.