Friend or Freund: Social Media and Transnational Connections in Berlin

Abstract

Transnational social media have become entwined in daily life in places like Berlin, articulating and facilitating social relationships at different geographic levels. As media technologies circulate transnationally, the relationship is changing between online communication practices and everyday experiences of place. This article contributes to transnational studies of HCI by rethinking how online practices shape geographic connections in contemporary Europe, especially regional German affiliations, local friendships, and translocal communities of interest. Drawing on ethnographic research with clusters of friends in Berlin and online, I examine how users participated in multiple networks in ways that transformed the meaning and experience of the local, regional, or transnational as spatial scales. This approach to transnational HCI calls attention to the uneven ways in which social media circulate according to implicitly American notions of friendship and sociality. German and other European users contended with Facebook categories that reflected culturally specific American interaction norms, often eliding or overlooking German language distinctions and understandings. The findings highlight how social media encode dominant cultural norms and reshape the experience of the local, global, and transnational in everyday life.

Notes

¹The name of the festival has been changed for confidentiality.

²For further discussion of code switching as scalemaking, see Kraemer (2012, pp. 149–157).

³Comparable to the practice of “Facestalking” among Australian users in a study by Young (2011, pp. 26–27).

Background. This article is based on material from the author's doctoral dissertation.

Acknowledgments. I am grateful to Tom Boellstorff, Paul Dourish, Mei Zhan, Keith Murphy, Lilly Irani, Jennifer Carlson, and four anonymous reviewers for insightful commentary and feedback.

Support. Funding for this research was provided by the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD, German Academic Exchange Service), the Department of Anthropology and the Intel/UCI People and Practices Research Initiative at the University of California, Irvine, and the University of California's Institute for European Studies.

HCI Editorial Record. First manuscript received April 13, 2012. Revisions received in October 2012 and April 2013. Accepted by Janet Vertesi. Final manuscript received June 25, 2013. — Editor