Friend or Freund: Social Media and Transnational Connections in Berlin

Abstract

Transnational social media have become entwined in daily life in places like Berlin, articulating and facilitating social relationships at different geographic levels. As media technologies circulate transnationally, the relationship is changing between online communication practices and everyday experiences of place. This article contributes to transnational studies of HCI by rethinking how online practices shape geographic connections in contemporary Europe, especially regional German affiliations, local friendships, and translocal communities of interest. Drawing on ethnographic research with clusters of friends in Berlin and online, I examine how users participated in multiple networks in ways that transformed the meaning and experience of the local, regional, or transnational as spatial scales. This approach to transnational HCI calls attention to the uneven ways in which social media circulate according to implicitly American notions of friendship and sociality. German and other European users contended with Facebook categories that reflected culturally specific American interaction norms, often eliding or overlooking German language distinctions and understandings. The findings highlight how social media encode dominant cultural norms and reshape the experience of the local, global, and transnational in everyday life.