Digital Young

The Internet network appeared in Romania around 1995 as a way to communicate between several friends. After their appearance, the logics of communication transgressed into an usage logics totally different of that one which has been imposed by the technical macro-system. Really fast, these networks extended very much in all the neighborhood, becoming local networks with a specific identity. Even if the market was open for big and little national and international societies who provide Internet, the battle is won by the little neighborhood networks. I put myself the question how to explain this phenomenon? I did a research in Bucharest during one year. I could observe that these networks offered a social virtual space in which the individual is feeling more relaxed in the communication and in the exchange of informations than in the space of a big network.

For about five year, the user of the local network has acquired a specific logics of practices which led him to re-appropriate the logics proved by the center of control and of power by the big system. This process of re-appropriation is a specific way to use the technical object, an appropriation which transforms him into a master of his uses and a manager of network and user of stocked informations. Inside of this network, each user (in spite of a social status in the real society) brings here everything he has (music, films, games etc) in order to share these stocked informations with the others. It resulted that the motivations who make users to remain in this network are of a functional nature, but also a symbolic one, in the way that they want to integrate in a virtual world of share, of gift and of redistribution: the new virtual identity acquired by his nickname gives him a new image of himself, liberated by the authority of social world (family, peer group, school, work etc).

I could see here the emergence of a virtual equal society whose principles and the practices are easily appropriated by users with a shared purpose: transgressing the real structured society by virtual community practices (virtual conviviality and the valorization of self). This virtual society becomes a parallel form of social organization as a wedge who resists to determinists pressures from the macro system.

In conclusion, the space of my research puts in evidence a spontaneous tendency of a social equal organization that the technical system facilitates in spite of internal logics.