ICTs, social thinking and subjective well-being – The internet and its representations in everyday life

Abstract

The spread of ICTs constitutes an intriguing phenomenon for studying the interweaving between ways of knowing, thinking and experiencing new ‘realities’. A suitable framework for investigating this topic is the social representations one, which addresses socially shared structures of knowledge, loaded with emotional features and symbolic values. In the present study, we explore how the internet is represented and how it is related to social well-being. The number of participants was 101. The components of the representation – information, attitude, representational field – were investigated using a qualitative–quantitative methodology; social well-being (in general, and after the internet entered one’s own life) was measured through Keyes’ scale [Social Well-Being. Social Psychology Quarterly , 61 ( 2 ), 121–140]; levels of practice were also taken into account. Participants show a medium–high level of social well-being in its various components (integration, acceptance, contribution, actualisation and coherence). A more complex picture appears ‘after internet’, with gains in terms of closeness, contribution, actualisation of society, counterbalanced by diminished trust in people and resort to one’s own group for security and comfort. The representational field opposes an intimate picture to a wider perspective; space to time; functional to experiential features of the internet. Participants take different positions on these dimensions, providing foreseen and unexpected patterns of images and meanings.