Thesis Title: Subtitle

Conclusion

The literature presented above focuses on young people’s experience of social networking sites and social media in general. From this research, it is possible to identify several trends. First, there is a strong inclination in the literature to view SNS profiles as performances of identity through the articulation of taste and friendship connections. The strong focus on youth practices online is perhaps inherent due to the structuring of Facebook, which was initially only available to university students. While this is no longer the case, it is understandable that university students are the focus of the majority of previous work.

However, restricting the sample to university students from a single institution limits the conclusions that can be drawn from the data, as they do not consider the implications of Facebook use outside of the university environment. It also does not consider the variations in Facebook usage and associated outcomes across differing demographics, which is characteristic of the majority of literature on social media. Like the previous research discussed, it also measures social capital in a generalised manner. Furthermore, the focus on relationships as the sole component of social media obscures other uses of this technology.

Fischer (1992) advocates contextually bound analysis that examines how devices are introduced and adopted, what people use them for, whether the use of a particular technology changes as it evolves, and how the flow-on effects of this use affects other actions and potentially alters the context for other actors. Accounting for context means accounting for what type of space Facebook could be. As demonstrated in the above literature, an analysis of Facebook’s architectural and spatial properties and how they

might shape users’ interactions is currently missing from the literature. Boyd and Ellison’s (2007) definition has assumptions about the type of space Facebook has built into its definition, and it is from this definition that much scholarship has started. It is clear that there is room for a further analysis of Facebook that does not take it status as public or semi-public as a given. Examining what kind of space Facebook might be means accounting for the relationship between Facebook’s architectures and users’ actions in this space while acknowledging that these two elements are mutually shaping. It is in this particular gap that this research is situated and extends from current scholarship.
Chapter 3
Methodology and Methods