From classroom event to networked visibility: audience amplification and the limits of relational embedding in higher education

Students' engagement and sense of belonging are increasingly shaped in settings where classroom experience and digital interaction overlap – what Floridi calls the “onlife” condition, in which online and offline life form a single continuum. This article examines one such episode. A well-known Italian influencer took part in the closing session of a university course, and the Department then narrated the visit through its official Instagram and Facebook accounts. We ask whether the visibility that those posts generated and students’ relational participation in the Department's online community are the same outcome or two different ones. To answer, we analysed two kinds of data: the engagement statistics that the platform reports for the Department's account and for the post and reel published on the day of the visit, each with its observation window and baseline; and the network of accounts that commented on, replied to or mentioned one another in the Department's posts, which we mapped with the NodeXL software. The platform data show a large but short-lived increase in visibility: on the day of the event the account recorded 5,885 views against a baseline of 465, three quarters of them from accounts that did not follow the Department, and two thirds of the week's profile visits and net follower growth fell in the forty-eight hours of the visit. The network data show almost no corresponding movement. The guest's account is connected to only two other accounts, and its betweenness centrality – a measure of how often an account lies on the shortest paths between other accounts, and therefore of its bridging role – derives entirely from a single tie. Ten of the 232 recorded edges date from the day of the event, and the event posts drew comments from only two accounts besides the guest's. Audience amplification and relational embedding thus emerge as distinct outcomes of the same intervention. The study does not measure subjective belonging directly; it identifies behavioural and structural proxies of belonging-related engagement and proposes a replicable two-layer approach in which the divergence between the layers is itself informative.