In 2014, French and Belgian Facebook members witnessed the flourishing of numerous Facebook groups dedicated to their town or village that shared the same rallying cry, “You’re a real … if …” This trend spread like wildfire, to the extent that more than 160 towns/villages now have an active page on the social network. Seniors are among the most active members of these groups. In this context, the general objective of our study consisted of identifying the mechanisms through which these pages participate in building a real geo-cultural community in which the oldest Facebook members play a central role. To do so, we performed a content analysis of the 842 posts and 5,314 comments written between December 5, 2014 and January 5, 2015 in the groups representing the cities of Hannut and Jodoigne (Belgium) as well as Fourmies and Harnes (France). Our study concerns the topics of the posts, the types of actions performed by the members and the interactions among them. Our research shows that such groups create intergenerational “affinity spaces,” which debunks common misconceptions about how seniors approach the digital world.Apparus en 2014, les groupes Facebook intitulés « T’es un vrai … si … », qui rassemblent les « vrais » habitants d’une ville, se sont développés comme une traînée de poudre. Aujourd’hui, plus de 160 groupes de ce type existent sur le réseau social. Les seniors font partie des membres les plus actifs de ces groupes. Dès lors, afin d’identifier dans quelle mesure de tels groupes créent une dynamique intergénérationnelle, nous avons procédé à une analyse de contenu des 842 billets et 5 314 commentaires rédigés entre le 5 décembre 2014 et le 5 janvier 2015 au sein des groupes dédiés aux villes de Hannut et Jodoigne (Belgique) ainsi que Fourmies et Harnes (France). Notre analyse porte sur les types de sujets traités, sur les types d’actions réalisées et sur les modes d’interaction. Il en ressort que ces groupes construisent des « espaces d’affinités » intergénérationnels, qui viennent tordre le cou aux représentations souvent négatives du rapport entre le numérique et la « personne âgée ».
In this article, the authors analyze citizens’ reactions to Brexit on social media after the referendum results by performing a content analysis of 5877 posts collected from the social media platform Flickr, written in English, German, French, Spanish or Italian. Their research aims to answer the three following questions: What multimodal practices are adopted by citizens when they react to societal events like Brexit? To what extent do these practices illustrate types of citizenship that are specific to social networks? Can we observe different reactions to Brexit according to the languages used by the citizens? The authors focus on the types of visual content the citizens used to react to Brexit, as well as on what types of social relations this content can particularly create between their authors and the other members of the Flick community. Their article also highlights to what extent these posts shared on Flickr show content that is in favour of, or against, Brexit.
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