Open Neighborhoods, Sense Of Community, And Instagram Use: Disentangling Modern Local Community Experience Through A Multilevel Path Analysis With A Multiple Informant Approach

This paper aims at deepening local community experience in a multilevel perspective, through ad-dressing the intertwinement between neighborhood shared representations, its members’ sense of community (SoC), and their social media community-related use. The latter is deepened as a potential way to face the dissonance rising from feeling tied to a community when it does not return social repre-sentations about itself. As community representations impact its members’ lives yet are shaped by their behaviors in turn, this study focuses on the interactions between individual and community levels. Three hundred and eighty Italian Instagram users from 33 neighborhoods were involved; a multiple in-formant methodology was used to detect community shared representations. What emerges suggests contrasting evidences about modern local community experience. Indeed, the nonindependence among community members was quite low, yet community representations about some of its social and envi-ronmental features proved to moderate the relationship between SoC and the considered community-related Instagram practice.