Thesis Title: Subtitle

Conclusion

According to Mark Zuckerberg (2013), Facebook’s mission is to make “the world more open and connected.” Given this vision, Zuckerberg created a platform that is designed to facilitate open sharing and create, as boyd (2011) identifies, a networked public. The results of this research show that users work with, and within, Facebook’s affordance to share in ways that suit them. Further, they use Facebook in a way that makes sense to them, and sometimes, as discussed in the chapter this means ignoring or resisting Facebook’s prompts to share and connect. Zuckerberg’s characterisation of Facebook would be what de Certeau (1984) would call a ‘proper meaning’. As words have ‘proper meanings’ places do too. However, regardless of an architect’s intent it is difficult to obtain proper meaning in the current use of space. This is because the act of using a place, of being in a place, of walking through it manipulates spatial organisation and creates

ambiguities within the structure. Facebook, as a parochial space, as the village square reimagined represents these ambiguities. Arguably the (re)creation of an intimate parochial sphere is out of step with Zuckerberg’s stated desire to make the world more open and connected. Instead it has been created by how users ‘walk’ Facebook and create their own style of use.

Therefore, understanding Facebook as a place and a space requires more than relying on a public/private dichotomy. Understanding what shapes Facebook as a place is central in understanding it as a social space, given Facebook is both a place and a space. By drawing on de Certeau (1984), Lofland (1998) and Lefebvre (1991), we can understand that social spaces such as Facebook are not only shaped by their architecture, but by users’ movements within, and their use of, this space. As an abstract place, Facebook was created by capital for its own purposes; the pre-ordained, uniform architecture of Facebook is reflective of this. Despite this, even abstract space can be resisted and re-shaped as it is in all modern urban environments. People demonstrate agency in this reshaping both in how space is used to ‘get around’, but also in how social relations are formed, maintained, ordered and sustained. Further, we can understand the relationship between architecture and human action as more than a uni-directional relationship in which technology influences human actions, but rather as a complex dialectical in which users are shaped by and shape the structures they inhabit.

So, encouraged by Facebook’s architecture, but being able to exert some agency within this structure, users have created a parochial space in which to enact part of their social lives. This parochial space shares many qualities with a pre-modern village square. It connects kin, work, and acquaintance connections in addition to more intimate personal relationships in the same place. The centralisation of these relationships creates a ‘social hum’, which users can access and participate in selective ways. However, unlike the traditional village square, users exert more agency over their participation, choosing to remain invisible or silent and unlike the traditional village, users are ultimately at the centre of their own village deciding or ‘curating’ who does and does not ‘live’ there.

Parochial spaces such as Facebook have been identified as essential to the development of identity as they serve as a space for individuals to try out new ideas or opinions before débuting them in the wider world (Calhoun 2007). Facebook has enabled users to more thoroughly and carefully curate who enters their parochial space.
Like the village, Facebook has become a consistent and reliable structure where participants can engage or observe as needed. This categorisation of Facebook as parochial space represents a departure from previous understandings of Facebook, which have generally categorised it as a public sphere, blurring the boundaries between public and private. This chapter demonstrates that the boundary between public and private is still a salient distinction. What that has been absent then is an understanding of the parochial realm, which provides a useful lens through which we can begin to understand users’ actions on, and relationship to, Facebook.
Chapter 7
Conclusion

In the context of late modernity sites such as Facebook give research an avenue to examine how individuals might be negotiating the demands of the late modern landscape. The general uptick in mobility over the life course is often argued to be a fragmenting force, which puts strain on personal relationships such as friendships. Some such as Lash (2002) and Virilio (1995, 2000), argue that late modernity is also characterised by the ‘speed’ of life, which appears to be accelerating. On the surface, technologies like Facebook may appear to be symptomatic of these characteristics of late modernity as it is a dis-embedded, non-corporeal space. As outlined in the first chapter of this thesis, Facebook appears to be geared towards quantity over quality which has led some scholars such as Turkle to argue that mediated technologies like Facebook have negative effects on our affective social relationships.

One of the other important characteristics of late modernity is personal reflexivity as argued by Giddens (1991) and Bauman (1992). This personal reflexivity allows individuals to consciously map and construct their identity, via a range of choices previously not accessible. However, the application of reflexivity to social space, and how these spaces might be constructed to resist some of the pressure of late modernity has only been sporadically theorised particularly in relation to social network sites. While there has been much research that argues that online communities in general serve many of the functions that face-to-face communities do, a consideration of Facebook as a social space, which is historically particular has yet to be fully articulated.

Therefore, I have investigated the construction of Facebook as a social space online. In doing this I have argued that if we are to better understand how spaces like Facebook work on a social level, we need to understand how these spaces are formed.

Understanding what type of space Facebook is helps delimit and contextualise the behaviour that occurs within it. This enables spatial understanding to be used as a conceptual framework to interpret users’ actions within a space.
Through using a case study method that involved interviewing, observation and a structured questionnaire, this thesis has addressed the following research questions, introduced in Chapter One:

• 
  How can Facebook be understood and conceptualised as a space?
  
• 
  What affordances does this space offer its users?
  
• 
  How are these affordances different or similar to other forms of mediated communication?
  
• 
  How might this space affect the way people present their ‘selves’?
  
• 
  To what extent does Facebook influence the way people think about friendship?
  

This chapter contains a summary of the research outcomes and conclusions relating to the above questions and then discusses the significance of these findings.

By identifying Facebook as a parochial space this thesis has added conceptual clarity to previous discussions of Facebook, which have relied on porous terms such as public and semi-public in an effort to explain Facebook conceptually. These terms do not necessarily add analytical clarity to the position of Facebook as a social space. Beer (2008) argues strongly that if the scholarship of Facebook and other SNS is to succeed, scholarship needs to engage in more analytical work, instead of relying on these colloquial terms to do it for us. 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 understanding 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 adapt to new technological systems, we also shape those systems by the way we make use of them, or as de Certeau would argue, how we walk 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 of central importance.