Virtualizing the Past: Re-connecting on Facebook and Emerging Social Relationships

Reconnecting with past relationships is documented as one of the main motivations for using Social Network Sites (SNSs) such as Facebook. Numerous studies underline the ways SNSs may support social interactions in the broad context of the offline-and-online seamless web. However, in the author´s knowledge, no studies have been conducted to link these two aspects, and very little research addresses the personal and social value of reconnecting experiences. This paper presents a pilot exploratory study with in-depth interviews. A small sample of Italian users were asked to tell a significant reconnecting experience they had during the Facebook tipping point in Italy, and how the re-acquired relation developed into the present. It emerged that the interviewees appropriate Facebook´s social architecture and social archive for re-thinking past relationships, bridging past and present self-narration and, most interestingly, cultivating new kinds of social relations that remain at present largely undefined both in common language and social research.