Pregnancy 2.0

Based on the analysis of a corpus of 300 posts written on Facebook by 20 pregnant Italian women, this chapter discusses the role of this social network in structuring sharable and socially acceptable narratives of the complex human experience of pregnancy. First, pregnancy is defined as an exquisitely narrative phenomenon that stimulates intersubjective forms of construction and representation. Second, the structural peculiarities of Facebook as a narrative device are described. Finally, an analysis of the corpus is proposed that unfolds on three levels: a global narrative, a linguistic-rhetoric, and a socio-pragmatic one. Along with indications on the informative power such narratives may have for socio-anthropological and linguistic research, some first conclusions are proposed on the constructional power of the platform in shaping biographical experiences and producing pregnancy narratives that are partly similar, and partly different, from those of the offline culture.