Collapsed Temporalities in Social Media

Abstract

Social network sites (SNSs) raise complex questions regarding the perception of time. They can also produce a feeling of “co-presence” (Miller, 2011), mixing temporalities of “past, present and future”. Within their affordances, SNSs generate “collapsed contexts” (Marwick and boyd, 2010). When it comes to migrants that leave their home countries, such tools are frequently used in order to maintain a connection with family, friends and land that were left behind. This paper aims at proposing the notion of “collapsed temporalities” to reflect upon Cuban migrants who (voluntarily and legally) moved to Brazil. Apart from the theoretical discussion, we analyze self-narratives on Facebook of two Cuban immigrants, who had agreed to participate in the research and also conceded us online interviews. We argue that, once displaced, they have to deal with multiple layers of temporalities that affect their own self-narratives in terms of language and content.