Facebook as a Finite Province of Meaning?

Abstract

Facebook today represents one of the main avenues that people use to create and develop relationships. Indeed, in the 10 years since its birth, Facebook has changed the concept of community, given new meaning to the sense of belonging and even produced a new language. However, what is its meaning? What is the real reason for its spread, which obviously goes beyond superficial and simplistic explanations? This article proposes a reading of Facebook using classical concepts of sociology such as the concepts of sense, action and meaning. Particular attention will be given to the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz and to his idea of finite provinces of meaning in order to discover whether it is a construct applicable to Facebook. To achieve this, we propose a phenomenology of Facebook to understand what kind of reality it represents and what similarities and differences are encountered in the prominent world of everyday life.