Local Cultures – Global Spaces

Abstract

According to global projections, two-thirds of the world’s population will be online by the end of 2023. This means that an average of 4.7 new social media users will be created every second (Datareportal, 2023). This can be seen as an indication that the internet is one of the fundamental pillars of the modern information society (Statista, 2023). At the local community level, people are using social media networks to participate in groups that represent their neighborhoods. Such groups are formed spontaneously among those living in a neighborhood and are made up of other residents. This new form of the neighborhood has been recognized by numerous authors and defined by the term hybrid communities (Cabitza et al., 2016; Mosconi et al., 2017) in the spirit of merging virtual and physical environments. This paper presents the results of a content analysis of two public Facebook neighborhood groups in Zagreb, Croatia. One neighborhood is dominated by single-family houses built at the beginning of the 20th century. In contrast, the other neighborhood was built at the end of the last century and is dominated by apartment buildings. A total of 897 items for the years 2019–2021 were extracted by hand and analyzed in Nvivo 14. They were analyzed based on a type of post and further on specific themes. The results, considering the COVID-19 period and the Zagreb earthquake in 2020, show the differences and similarities between these two groups.