Thesis Title: Subtitle

Chapter Five examines how users’ self-presentation on Facebook can be understood as intrinsically linked to the relationships which are also conducted on Facebook. As an object, Facebook wants users to include as much information about themselves as possible. However, this demand to present oneself in its entirety is in conflict with how users have constructed Facebook as a social space. Instead, users must juggle Facebook’s demand for self-presentation with considerations of reputational damage. The compromise is that participants present an edited version of themselves. This cannot be understood simply as an expressive act of self-presentation because participants choose to emphasise the instrumental functions of Facebook. Their use of Facebook is conceptualised as a means to an end; for example information sharing, making travel arrangements and posting things generally categorised as useful or informative.
Even though participants are reluctant to understand their interaction on Facebook as an expressive act, instrumental posts still carry signifiers of the self. Congruent with this was participants’ emphasis on reserving or editing parts of their self-presentation and choosing not to express them through Facebook. This is an important distinction as it speaks to the tensions that underlie self-presentation on Facebook. Understanding self-presentation and authenticity through this lens is significant. This position recognises that self-presentation online, not as a separate act distinct from the offline environment, but one that is intrinsically linked to an offline self. The blurring of online and offline spheres require participants to negotiate the demands of both environments. The particular way that Facebook blurs online and offline experiences is unique and historically unprecedented.
In Chapter Six I extend on the groundwork of the previous chapters and examine how we might understand what type of space Facebook is and how this space is produced.
Facebook is a place and a space - albeit an abstract space rather than an organic space (Lefebvre 1991). This means Facebook was created by capital for its own purposes. But even abstract space can be resisted and re-shaped (de Certeau 1984) as it is in all modern urban environments. Examining the literature concerning urban spaces provides usefully conceptual tools with which to understand the social meanings attached to spaces. People demonstrate agency in this reshaping not only in how space is used to ‘get around’, but also in how social relations are formed, maintained, ordered and sustained.
The space of Facebook can be usefully compared to the ‘village square’ in that relationships are largely parochial (and homophilic); there is little of the public realm or the stranger about Facebook. This is a conceptualisation of Facebook that much of the previous literature has missed. Although Facebook potentially gives the comfort of Tönnies’ (1991) gemeinschaft village square, which is something often missing for many contemporary urban dwellers in late modernity, it has important differences. Relationships are formed, ordered and sustained within this space, but are also constrained by the dictates of Facebook’s architecture and the reflexive preferences of the user. This chapter emphasises the dialectical relationship between Facebook’s architecture and users’ actions, structure and agency.
Finally, in Chapter Seven I summarise the key findings of the research. I also draw attention to the limitations of the study and how future research could address these limitations. In this chapter I argue that being more analytically particular with the terms
used to talk about SNS renders us more sensitive to the differences between these spaces, and by extension, helps us to understand how users act and make use of these spaces. This demonstrates an understanding of technological systems and our social relationships as mutually shaping. As we are able to adapt to new technological systems, we also shape those systems by the way we make use of them, or as de Certeau (1984) would argue, how we walk to the city. In order to understand how spaces like Facebook are constituted, an understanding and acknowledgement of the dialectical relationship between their architecture and their users’ appropriation of this architecture is key.
Understanding Facebook as a space allows us to position it more accurately within the broader context of late modernity and the questions this raises.
Chapter 2

Literature Review: Technology, Mediated Communication and Facebook