First, students prevalent use of Facebook is mainly instrumental, if we exclude the practice of
meeting old friends, which is not relevant in most students everyday life. Respondents say that their
daily communications within the SNS are mainly aimed at organizing off-line meetings with
friends, exchanging few quick information or, when face-to-face encounters are not possible,
replacing other forms of socialization (such as IM, texts, phone calls). Bicocca undergraduate
students mainly fit into the “genre of participation” defined as “hanging-out” by Ito et al (2010) that
stands for a minimum engagement with technology. In fact, Facebook is mostly used to “orchestrate
face-to-face hanging out” (ibid. 40) and, more generally, students adopt “new media communication
to construct spaces for copresence where they can engage in ongoing, lightweight social contact
that moves fluidly between online and offline” (ibid. 38)