Introduction

With our project we would like to examine the use of status updates on Facebook. We want to look into what it is that makes people communicate through Facebook updates what they get out of it. Furthermore we want to discover how people use the updates in terms of self presentation.

Our research question is:

Why and how do people use status updates on facebook?

Literature

Blah blah blah

Conclusion
Our literature gives us a good basis for understanding people’s use of social networks, also in terms of self presentation. However there’s no literature available covering the subject of Facebook status updates in particular which is why we now need to go explore the field.

References

One thing is what an individual expresses on a social network site – it is quite another thing who is at the receiving end of these expressions; the audience. To gain insight in this matter, we employ some of danah boyd’s works, in which she can be said to shed light upon the complex character of the audiences on social network sites, from different angles.

In the paper Friends, Friendsters, and MySpace Top 8: Writing Community Into Being on Social Network Sites (2006) boyd, currently a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, investigates the concept of ‘Friendship’ on social network sites – what it means and how it affects the culture of the sites.

One of boyd’s points is that peoples’ reasons for ‘Friending’ each other on social network sites are many and varied – some of the most common ones being that it would be socially inappropriate to say no, that it is the only way to see a private profile or simply that the person asking for ‘Friendship’ is an acquaintance, a family member or a colleague. Thus, the concept of a ’Friend’ on a social network site covers a variety of relationships which include but are not limited to actual friendships.

In the light of our subject, boyd’s findings are interesting because they call tell us something about what kind of audience people are dealing with when they express themselves (i.e. when they use status updates) on social network sites – an audience of a heterogeneous composition, consisting both of actual friends, but also family members, colleagues, acquaintances and sometimes even virtual strangers.

In the article Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What? (2007) boyd addresses social network sites as mediated publics and she looks at how these are different from unmediated publics, in effect investigating further the subject of the audience.

She lists four properties that in her opinion are unique to the mediated publics: persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible Audiences. According to her, these properties change everything we know about what is private and what is public – making it difficult to figure out who is listening in on social network sites.

boyd further explores the concepts of public and private in the essay Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence (2008), looking at the introduction of the newsfeed feature on Facebook in 2006.

Even though the newsfeed only made already-accessible information more visible the feature caused uproar among Facebook-users, who felt exposed. The root of this problem, boyd claims, is that digital media have a black and white (or ‘on’ and ‘off’) relationship to the concepts of public and private – a relationship that does not always correspond to the offline reality, with its myriad of grey areas: Facebook-users would envision one person or a specific group of people as the receivers of one of their messages, but instead, due to the newsfeed feature, their whole network was notified of this message, exposing the sender to unwanted attention. boyd refers to this as  social convergence , which is when different social contexts collapse into one and thus force people to deal with several audiences simultaneously.

boyds thoughts on audiences,  including her thoughts on privacy and social convergence, can most likely serve as reference points for our future research and as a framework for understanding the consequences of people expressing themselves through status updates, when it is not always apparent who is actually at the receiving end of their expressions.

(Pi)

Even though the paper examines IM away messages and not facebook updates we find the communicative functions that Baron highlights transmissible to examining the communicative function of status updates.
Baron examines eg. “Why do some AIM users choose the public forum of away messages to convey information seemingly targeted to selective members of their buddy list?” (Baron 2007: 15). This is a matter that we would like to investigate in relations to facebook updates.

Another text that gives us guidelines as to how status updates can be categorized is Nadja Pass. This is our only text that focuses on status updates specifically. The text categorizes status updates into 10 types and can thus be used for recognizing patterns in our collected status updates.

(Christina)

The paper contributes to our understanding of why people post public messages instead of private ones. Baron suggests that “Sometimes, the rationale for posting “private” messages is less friendship than public display” (Baron 2007: 16).
One of the findings in Barons study is that there is a gap between the denotative content (Surface) and the connotative content (Underlying meaning) of a message (Baron 2007: 9). This theory is similar to Goffman’s two types of signs that T Rasmussen refers to in the article ’MASKEN FORAN MASKEN – E. Goffman og personlig presentasjon på web’ (The mask on top of the mask – E. Goffman and self presentation on the web). We find this theory interesting when looking into how people use their status updates – what do they write, and what meanings can be derived from that?

Rasmussens text can be used to achieve an understanding of how Goffmans theory of self presentation can be utilized to understand online behaviour. A succesful self presentation is according to Goffman not about convincing people that you are in a certain way. As long as the audience plays along and lets the sender stay in character the ‘play’ has proved successful. Goffmans theory is however limited to focusing on what goes on in the interaction – what you can observe – and not what goes on inside people’s heads. (Rasmussen 2003: 3). In order for us to answer our sub question: how people perceive others from what they write in their status we need to perform a qualitative study and ask our informants. Compared to our other theory Rasmussens article is characterized as being more essay-like and less supported by explicit use of references.

A third text that deals with self presentation is the paper Identity Management: Multiple Presentations of Self on Facebook (2007) by Joan DiMicco and David Millen, researchers at IBM Research.
The paper sets out to explore the issues related to managing different social networks through one social network site (Facebook). It focuses particularly on how people manage the seemingly very different self presentations that are required in an informal environment and a corporate environment, respectively.
DiMicco and Millen distinguish between three different ways of managing presentations of self on Facebook. They claim that the three distinct categories of behavior provide a framework for thinking about how individuals manage self presentation when faced with different social contexts simultaneously.

While these categories are useful in our project, the article doesn’t offer a thorough and systematic exploration of how exactly people manage their self presentations, which tools they employ and what choices they make. As such, this work can serve our purpose as a starting point, and can guide our study of how people use status updates and which strategies of self-presentation are inherent in this use.

(Christina + Pi)

Three findings emerged from Skinstad’s analysis. First of all she establishes Facebook as a sociable network. She distinguishes between the way that close friends and acquaintances interact. Besides being a sociable network she defines Facebook as a transparent network, where definitions of public and private have changed challenging the concept of acquaintances (Simmel). Her third finding was that even though people have access to far more private stuff about their acquaintances than was the case before it doesn’t strengthen their ties. She thus calls Facebook a static network as there’s no change in relationships despite more knowledge of acquaintances (Skinstad 2008: 1).

(Christina)

Jeg spammer lige lidt her:

Jeg har lidt svært ved bedømme mine tekster ud fra Irinas spørgsmål – vil forsøge så godt jeg kan, og kan godt se at de måske mest skal fungere som en slags vejledning, men synes de er lidt firkantede?

Synes fx at spørgsmålene kører meget på hvilke beviser der findes (i form af data/ kilder) og hvordan forfatteren bruger disse til at understøtte sine argumenter – men jeg sidder fx nu med en artikel, hvor der ikke rigtig er så meget data/ kildeværk (forfatteren skriver om en overgang i 2006 , hvor medlemmer blev vrede over en ændring i en af facebooks funktioner, og hendes ‘data’/ ‘kilder’ består så i, at hun henviser så til nogle internet-protestgrupper som blev oprettet imod disse ændringer).

Ved at forfatteren er anerkendt inden for SNS-studier (og hun er desuden fra Harvard), men med Irinas spørgsmål er det lige som om, at alt der ikke bliver bakket op af en masse data bare bliver diskvalificeret?

Nå, ville egentlig bare høre om nogle af jer havde det samme problem – og ellers: nevermind;)

har fundet 2 tekster mere som jeg gerne vil læse, håber det er okay

jeg har forsøgt at ligge min post under Christinas teori – og pi’s som comment- men det kan jeg ikke finde ud af – derfor kommer min som new post.. sorry

1 – Creating social action through facebook by Vanderluis,Kelly

2 -Virtual Friendship and  the New Narcissism by Rosen, Christine

3 – Strano, M. M. (2008). User Descriptions and Interpretations of Self-Presentation through Facebook Profile Images. Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 2(2), article 1.
http://cyberpsychology.eu/view.php?cisloclanku=2008110402&article=1

4 – Ellison, N., Heino, R., & Gibbs, J. (2006). Managing impressions online: Self-presentation processes in the onlinedating environment. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(2), article 2.http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue2/ellison.html

5- A Face(book) in the crowd: Social Searching vs.Social browsing  by Lampe C, Ellison N, Steinfield C