Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship
Source: boyd, d.m. & Ellison, N.B. (2007) Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11. http://www.jcmc.indiana.edu/vol3/issue1/boyd.ellison.html
Definition of Social Network Sites:
Web-based services that allow individuals to:
- construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system
- articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection
- view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system
It’s not just about allowing individuals to meet strangers, but more of enabling users to “articulate and make visible their social networks”. Primarily, the users’ reason to join a social network site is to communicate with “people who are already a part of their extended social network”.
“The term ‘Friends’ can be misleading, because the connection does not necessarily mean friendship in the everyday vernacular scene, and the reasons people connect are varied” (boyd, 2006a).
I find this to be true, especially when I’m asked to ‘accept’ a ‘friend request’ from someone (who could be within my extended network or not). Initially, when I was getting used to a social network site, I was having doubt to click on the ‘accept’ button, because I didn’t ‘consider’ certain people as ‘my friend’. After some time, I noticed that there’s not much difference whether I accept or not the friend request, thus I started to accept all request with a purpose of extending my network. In other words, my purpose of joining (and maintaining) the social network sites changes through time – from ‘joining the site because all my friends are in the site’, to ‘joining the site to get to know more (new) people’.
“SNSs vary greatly in their features and user base. Some have photo-sharing or video-sharing capabilities; others have built-in blogging and instant messaging technology…”
The various features provided by different social network sites make it difficult for the users to choose which site they should maintain and be loyal to. I received a feedback from a student that she has accounts in various sites and she finds it difficult to maintain, and this makes her frustrated to even log in to the site anymore. I started having the same feeling when I first got used to Friendster, and it got worse when I registered for Facebook (which made my network expanded drastically from 0 to 100 within few days!) when all my ‘friends’ started shooting in greetings and applications. I like Friendster because of the blog feature, but I found that Facebook could ‘mirror-blog’ my existing blog (from Blogger) but the readers wouldn’t be the same audience… When I upload photos in Friendster, I have to upload the same photos in Facebook because the group of friends are different and they want to view my photos, but at the same time the same members from Friendster would be complaining saying that they’ve been seeing the same photos of mine… so many dilemmas.
Impression Management and Friendship Performance:
“Marwick (2005) found that users on three different SNSs had complex strategies for negotiating the rigidity of a prescribed ‘authentic’ profile, while boyd (in press) examined the phenomenon of ‘Fakesters’ and argued that profiles could never be ‘real’.”
I find this to be true, where we can’t be sure if the profile is a ‘real’ identity. Unless we know the person, we would not bother if the person uses a different nickname or different profile details. If the person is a stranger, it would give a huge doubt for us to accept the person as part of our network. After a while, we can make out whether the name is authentic or not, and probably we would get used to it that it wouldn’t be a bother anymore.
Some people may accept a person as how he portrays himself, and learn to know him after he’s accepted as part of the network. Yet, most of us would possibly prefer to know the true person first before accepting him into the network. Normally, if the ‘unidentified’ person is a member within our extended network, and the friend we share with this person is known to be very particular of letting others be within his/her network, then it would be easier to judge the ‘authenticity’ of the person before we accept him. If this case happens, I usually ask the friend whom we share about the ‘unidentified’ person before accepting him into my network.
“… the use of Friendster Testimonials as self-presentational devices (boyd & Heer, 2006) and the extent to which the attractiveness of one’s Friends (as indicated by Facebook’s ‘Wall’ feature) impacts impression formation (Walther, Van Der Heide, Kim & Westerman, in press).”
Talking about Testimonials and Wall, I treat these two interesting features as part of my ‘portfolio’ and ‘recommendation quotes’ that my friends and referees could post for me. Probably Wall is more of a ‘public message’, due to the word “wall” (whatever posted on the wall can be seen by everybody) that Facebook uses. As for Testimonials, when I first read the term, I thought Friendster provides the feature to allow members to promote each other in terms of testifying the authenticity of their friends, and their skills. At least that’s what I did initially for my friends’ Testimonials.
References:
boyd, d. (2006a). Friends, Friendsters, and MySpace Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites. First Monday, 11 (12). Retrieved July 21, 2007 from http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_12/boyd/
boyd, d. (in press). None of this is real. In J. Karaganis (Ed.), Structures of Participation. New York: Social Science Research Council.
boyd, d., & Heer, J. (2006). Profiles as conversation: Networked identity performance on Friendster. Proceedings of Thirty-Ninth Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press.
Marwick, A. (2005, October). "I'm a lot more interesting than a Friendster profile:" Identity presentation, authenticity, and power in social networking services. Paper presented at Internet Research 6.0, Chicago, IL.
Walther, J. B., Van Der Heide, B., Kim, S. Y., & Westerman, D. (in press). The role of friends' appearance and behavior on evaluations of individuals on Facebook: Are we known by the company we keep? Human Communication Research.
Having my own purpose and preference over SNSs,
- Sha @ Teaching and Learning
08 Oct 2008
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