Social networks, the endless scroll changes the relationship with time and space

"Although platforms are practically global monopolies, people will continue to use them and adapt them to their local needs. Local use happens mainly with messaging: it is there - in private and with interactions not mediated by algorithms - that we personalise our communication. We choose who to listen to, we address micro-niches, we talk about us and our context, we do business and relationship maintenance'. So says Gabriella Taddeo, professor of theory and technique of digital media and design of social interactions at the University of Turin, who has been engaged for years in analysing cultural practices and new forms of online sociality.

After all, the specificities of our surfing reverberate in the multimedia contributions in an endless mosaic. "Posts, videos and reels are the realm of entertainment and this is where generalist creators work best. It's no coincidence that global celebrities such as Ronaldo are the masters. Khabi Lame, the world's first tiktoker, is a perfect expression of this language: the absence of a voice in his videos has made him a universally understandable icon, beyond the language barrier. However, even here the boundaries between global and local are destined to reconfigure: artificial intelligence makes it possible to subtitle in any language within seconds. Automatic translation, together with the ease with which also thanks to AI anyone can generate content, are new technological assets capable of revolutionising the global social landscape once again,' points out Taddeo, in the bookshop with 'Social - L'industria delle relazioni', published by Einaudi.

 But we should not draw hasty conclusions about a newfound triumph of proximity. Because according to Taddeo, the game is being played on a new spatial and temporal paradigm that makes us be everywhere, that is, near and far at the same time. The proof? The increase in local original content, i.e. products that are very far away and can also be enjoyed in the original language. A kind of Squid Game effect, one could summarise. "Smartphones have made digital wearable everywhere, in every context. They allow us to interact with spaces other than our physical context and also to temporally modulate the flow of communication, once relegated almost exclusively to the real time of face-to-face. Being able to modulate space and time of communication has been an innovation that is indeed revolutionary. Hence our contemporary use of social media: we look at a cook in a remote Kazakh village instead of our neighbours on the metro, or we prefer to reply in chat rather than help a friend in need in real time. The mobile phone sucks us into spaces and times totally chosen by us: sometimes this power also turns into a convenient trap. Being elsewhere, in space and time, takes power away from the here and now,' says Taddeo.

At the heart of it all is the value of relationships. "We must not only mean them between people, but also between people and content. Algorithms since TikTok have moved towards a hyper-personalisation of content that is built on an often even subliminal knowledge of our profile. TikTok, for instance, has based its algorithm more on the microseconds we devote to each scene in the video than on our declared tastes. In this way it is able to get to know our thoughts, our habits and even our weaknesses in greater depth, proposing messages that are configured specifically for us at each scroll,' says Taddeo. No more generalist logic, the key lies in the tailor-made suit worn for our different occasions of mediated sociality. On the other hand,' points out Taddeo, 'if today personalisation takes place at feed level, i.e. at content sequence level, it will soon be even more granular. "Personalisation will take place at the level of individual content, with the production of content generated on the basis of our feedback. One aspect of this new dynamic, however, is that we often do not even realise it exists: if in a dialogue, or even with a like, we are making an explicit relational choice, maintaining a form of symmetry and interactive awareness, in the new algorithms the attention metric develops an implicit, unintentional and often even unwanted relationship. From all this we often derive our sense of unease when scrolling: content is made in relation to us, but without us, or rather without the more cognitive and deliberate part of our self,' Taddeo concludes.