Dont be a balti,give answers to questions,join IBIBO.COM and “Friendster is like having a collection of baseball cards of all of your friends.” — Cathy
While Friending is a social act, the actual collection of Friends and the display of Top Friends provides space for people to engage in identity performance. As Judith Donath and I argued in “Public Displays of Connection,” people display social connections to reveal information about who they are (Donath and boyd, 2004). While the bulk of one’s Profile is completely within the participant’s control — the demographics, photos, self-description, tastes — what photos Friends choose to use as their primary image and what they write as Comments is less controlled. (It is not completely uncontrolled as people can reject Comments, delete Friends, and pressure Friends to write Comments or change their photo.) This external material complements the personally written material to paint a broader picture of an individual. Turned around, “guilt through association” simply means that your friends’ performance reflects highly on you.
“so my utter hatred of myspace and my peers decided to fuse into one fun after-school activity! i used the friend finder on myspace to find a popular kid at school, and surfed through their top 8. yea, it’s creepy, but it’s HILARIOUS! you find out all sorts of lol-worthy information, such as kim loves porn, jen’s pic was taken outside my 6th grade classroom, and michelle can’t blow gum for shit.” — Suzy
As an exercise in self-esteem building, Suzy decided to explicitly frame one girl through the lens of her Friends. This is well supported on social network sites because Friends are linked from Profiles. As people navigate Profiles, they build an image of who people are through their Friends.
The networked nature of impressions does not only affect the viewer — this is how newcomers decided what to present in the first place. When people first joined Friendster, they took cues from the people who invited them. Three specific subcultures dominated the early adopters — bloggers, attendees of the Burning Man [14] festival, and gay men mostly living in New York. If the invitee was a Burner, their Profile would probably be filled with references to the event with images full of half-naked, costumed people running around the desert. As such, newcomers would get the impression that it was a site for Burners and they would create a Profile that displayed that facet of their identity. In decided who to invite, newcomers would perpetuate the framing by only inviting people who are part of the Burning Man subculture.
Interestingly, because of this process, Burners believed that the site was for Burners, gay men thought it was a gay dating site, and bloggers were ecstatic to have a geek socializing tool. The reason each group got this impression had to do with the way in which context was created on these systems. Rather than having the context dictated by the environment itself, context emerged through Friends networks. As a result, being socialized into Friendster meant connected to Friends that reinforced the contextual information of early adopters.
Much to the chagrin of the developers, the early adopters of Friendster framed the social norms, not the system’s designers. Taking advantage of the technological affordances, early adopters used the site to meet their needs. In turn, because of the networked structure of Friendster, they passed on their norms to their friends. Their Profiles signaled what type of people belonged and their communication practices conveyed what types of behavior one could expect.
As the site grew, different groups started joining. The centrality of the network decreased at the same time that people were forced to face conflicting social contexts. While the site proliferated amongst Burners, gay men, and bloggers, it also spread into new groups. As those on the periphery of these
Answered by
Mohd Farooq
, an ibibo Master,
at
4:46 PM on May 01, 2008
