Topic of the thesis: Online spaces of discussion and self-presentation: the effects of digital affordances on forms of opinion expression.
Abstract: Building upon multisited ethnography (Marcus 1995) and digital methods (Rogers 2013),a conceptualization of spaces of discussion is proposed to refer to the digital places where online conversation takes place. This puts emphasis on the potential effects of actants (Latour 2005) such as specific characteristics, features, and affordances of each website, network and space in which a topic is discussed. Building upon this concept, the notion of self-censorship - borrowing from the spiral of silence theory (Noelle-Neumann 1974) and the concept of preference falsification (Kuran 1995) - is expanded to include the shifts in use of different spaces as phenomena of self-censorship, as related to mechanisms of self-representation (Goffman 1959). Such a conceptualization of spaces and self-censorship goes over the dichotomy of macro and micro levels (Latour 2012), and will be tested analysing the online conversation around an obtrusive and controversial issue (e.g. vaccination and vaccine practices), to determine if different spaces influence opinion. Social media data will be compared across spaces at different points in time, using automated quantitative text analysis to determine the potential effects of spaces of discussion on opinion, and will be supplemented and completed by interviews administered to a sample of the same users.

Research interests: Digital sociology; Public Opinion; Experimental Methodology; Sociology of Mass Media and Communication Studies.
Graduated from: University of Milan.
Degrees obtained: - MA in Public and Corporate Communication (Public Opinion, Market and Communication Research). University of Milan. - BA in Humanities for Communication Studies, University of Milan.

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