Thesis Title: Subtitle

Conclusion

In conceptualising this project, I was faced with a very broad research field. The pervasiveness of Facebook makes it mundane and an almost invisible part of daily lives. This research task required an approach that recognised the importance of agency and shared meanings, but also acknowledged the existence and persistence of certain social structures and forms that affect the ways individuals use SNS, including the technological features of a SNS itself. To do this required an approach that viewed objects as partners in the generation of meaning. This means acknowledging that actors construct meanings as they engage with objects in the social world (Crotty 1998).
With an active users base of approximately 1 billion monthly active users (Facebook 2014) the task of this research was to place appropriate boundaries around a population that numbered in the millions. Previous studies examining Facebook users have commonly used an institutional framework, such as a school or university to create a sample.
However, limiting the scope of my research in this way meant that this project would largely replicate the focus of previous work on young people. As such, I decided to engage with Facebook in the way it is intended to be used as a social networking tool, using my own Facebook as the basis of a case study. This meant adopting a user-centred research design, in which reality is understood to be both “objectively existent and subjectively perceived” (Beneito-Montagut 2011: 719). Doing so required an adaptive methodological approach that utilised various techniques in order to gather and analyse data. Firstly, as I sought to understand Facebook as a social networking tool, I used my own network to create a case study of a social network. Within this case study, several methods were used to gather data that were both deep and broad; questionnaires, interviewing and
observational data. Thus, this project takes the middle ground between a socially determined construction of technology, which focuses on the way social forces shape technology, and technological determinism which views technology as shaping social contexts. While many theorists and researchers have convincingly written about the ways in which technology is a product of its social circumstances (see Misa et al. 2003), technology is an also constraining factor that can limit and shape possible outcomes.
Chapter 4

Real Friends: Understanding Friendship and Facebook