Copenhagen.
The final session at COST298 today starts with Romina Cachia, and she shifts our attention to social networking. How do such sites differ from other applications? They are built around the presentation of oneself, though a public display of information, and around this users socialise and form communities. Active users are thus integrated into the production process and into bottom-up activities. This reorganises Internet geography - and what's more, these sites are mostly free and easy to use, contrary to conventional homepages.
These sites are in a sense public playgrounds for users, including playing with personal identity (and the sites also present the users' identities to themselves. There is a perhaps a gradual shift from anonymity and pseudonymity to presenting the 'real' self - especially on sites such as Facebook, presenting fictitious personal data is seen as inapropriate. In participating, users construct their personal identity rather than merely describing it. Profiles thus act as a kind of hyperlinked avatars - and while their traces may be fragmented, they nonetheless constitute whole identities, not least also through the increasing mash-up of applications (or mesh-up of profiles - this also creates problems for people who do want to maintain different profiles in different spaces).
For younger users joining such spaces, this is an act of presenting themselves to their peer community, and of moving from parental to friend relationships. Even mundane acts such as presenting music playlists are a way of capturing one's persona at any given point in time; Facebook's status updates are another example for this. Through always-on technologies, such activities are now embedded ever more deeply into everyday life, and are no longer just used for leisure.
Further, what we see here is the externalisation of networks - an increase in the sharing, disclosure, and visibility of personal networks. Some users compete to have very large social networks on such sites, of course, and the motivations for this need to be further researched (beyond mere peer competition). The ease of adding people to one's network also leads users to extend their networks more easily to include people they don't personally know, including to celebrities and other noteworthy people. A key problem here is privacy, and this is often poorly understood by users themselves. There is a strong push to sacifice privacy to gain the benefits following from public disclosure.
Romina's further research focusses on analysing such social networks, and establishing the extent to which users feel a sense of community with the members of their networks. Overall, there are indications that being in smaller groups, combined with personal networks, leads to this sense of community.
