Prospettive di Connessioni Urbane∗: a case study about using Instagram to keep in touch with urban places in Naples (Italy) during COVID-19 pandemic

Location-aware, ubiquitous, social media have proved broad affordances which can impact their users’ local community experience, sustaining and enhancing their tie to their community as a set of meaningful places and as a social and relational entity – that is, their self-in-community. Thus, when COVID-19-related restrictions have partially or totally hindered the opportunities for individuals to attend common places in their community and, more specifically, to keep in touch with their social meanings, these social media have represented reliable alternative strategies to do so. Our “Prospettive di Connessioni Urbane” (Perspectives of Urban Connections) project relied on Instagram with the aim to increase citizens’ focus on and contact with local places and their social dimensions – even when their attendance was hindered by COVID-19-related restrictions. We provided an Instagram account as an outlet for citizens’ photos highlighting how some places were linked to social dimensions for them and launched a hashtag which could make users feel part of a community and allow more visibility to the contents. Furthermore, the collected photos were also located on a virtual map, allowing citizens at large to take a virtual tour of their city and feel their social meanings even when they were hindered from doing it in person. These tools could provide social and community psychologists as well as designers with useful pieces of information to disentangle the patterns of the interplay between social media community-related uses and local community experience.