Thesis Title: Subtitle

Social Network Sites: Concerns and Possibilities

Facebook is not separate from the contours of late modernity outlined above. In fact, it speaks too many of the anxieties around late modernity; that individualisation leads to social isolation, through seeming lack of commitment and depth in our social relationships (Bauman 2000). When Facebook is situated in the context of these effects, anxieties around its increasing social presences make sense. Facebook, in some ways, appears to be a continuation of the dis-embedding on social life identified by Giddens.
Thus the question of place, our relationship to it, and how it affects social relationships is at the heart of late modernity. This becomes particularly important when considering the role that mediated communication plays in daily life. Are we able to have authentic interactions when they are disembedded from place? Dreyfus (1999, 2001) argues that authentic relationships require physical presence and suggests without embodied engagement there can be no risk, and therefore no commitment. Thus, interactions taking place without physical presence are trivialised as insignificant (Dreyfus 1999, 2001).
However, as Facebook’s growing user base will attest, disembodied places are compelling in some way to their users. To understand why this might be, we need to understand how this relationship affects our intimate social relationships such as friendship, and if authentic self-presentation is possible in disembodied spaces. In disembodied spaces, not only are we not corporeally present to account for our actions, but the space where actions take place seems to shift and reconfigure continuously. This is partly due to Facebook’s continual modification of its layout and other technical features, but is also due to an ongoing lack of consensus about what type of space Facebook might be. Facebook it seems wants to create a widely ranging public forum that allows people to interface their lives with Facebook. This is apparent in its increased integration with many aspects of the web, which makes the task of delineating where Facebook starts and stops increasingly difficult. While Facebook may have many similarities to a public space, users continue to use it to share personal and intimate details about their lives.