Abstract

The paper presents an ethnographic exploration of the daily life of twenty-something Romans, exploring the role of social media in their struggle to settle down and ‘re-invent’ themselves as adults. The paper argues that social media, while expanding individuals’ horizons of possibility to the point that it becomes difficult to define their subjectivities, are used to construct «incidental narratives» of the self. These allow them to engage in social practices of imagination, but at the same time bind them to build such imagination within the sometimes-rigid frames proposed by social media platforms