Thesis Title: Subtitle

Research Questions

The advent of technologies like Facebook has given unprecedented scope to present and (re)create personal biographies. This seems to be in step with the individualisation that scholars observe as being a condition of late modernity, wherein identity becomes a task for individuals to manage and create (Giddens 1990; Bauman 2000). Facebook seems particularly well suited for this task as it can host various aspects of identity that are important in the creation of the self, including family and other personal relationships. It can display biographical information, including work history, as well as displaying interests, tastes and subcultural affiliations. Facebook represents an important space in which the self may be interactively realised.
Facebook, as a technology is now a rather stable part of the internet landscape and has outlasted many of its competitors. I argue that this is in part to it providing a counterpoint to some of the ‘disembeddedness’ that characterises late-modern life. Facebook is a place that goes with its users no matter how mobile they are. Although Facebook frequently changes its design and layout, the core remains the same – it is a place to communicate with people you know, regardless of geography and distance. Despite this, scholars still speak relatively little about the type of place Facebook might be, which could go some way in explaining its relative longevity despite various upheavals such as the introduction of the news feed. In order to address what type of place Facebook might be, this research will address several questions. Firstly, it asks:

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  To what extent does Facebook influence the way people think about friendship?
  

Generally, it is accepted that Facebook contains a number of different types of social relationships including family, work colleagues, old school friends, acquaintances and friends. I have chosen to address friendship as the primary social relationship examined in this research as it targets the core of some of the anxieties surrounding social relationships, not only on Facebook, but in late modernity in general. As a voluntary and affective relationship, friendship, with its lack of institutional backing, would be the first type of relationship to feel the pressures of a disembedded late modern life, such as loss of attachment to place and the positions of personal relationships as part of the reflexive project of individualisation (Giddens 1990, 1992; Bauman 2000). Does Facebook simply extend these trends by enabling us to create a persona vis-à-vis our social relationships? To address this I propose the following question:

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  How might Facebook affect the way people present their ‘selves’?
  

As previously addressed, some scholars such as Dreyfus (1999, 2001) argue that authentic relationships require embodied engagement. Without the body present to authenticate one’s self-presentation, the concern is that that these relationships lack commitment as they are not predicated on the truthful revelation of the self. However, Facebook is not an anonymous online space as a person’s friends on Facebook generally reflect their offline social life and experience. Examining how the presence of others who are able to authenticate or dispute one’s self-presentation affects how Facebook is used and, by extension, will also illuminate what type of space Facebook might be.² Therefore, from this I address the question:

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  What affordances does this space offers its users?
  

This question seeks to answer to the dialectical relationship between the objective constraints of an object of technology and how these features are used and understood by its users. Facebook is not an unstructured place where users are free to interact with its architecture (code) and redesign it in a way that befits their needs and taste. Part of the challenge of analysing SNS lies in understanding the affordances offered by them and in understanding how individuals use and make sense of these affordances. The term ‘affordances’ was first coined by Gibson (1979) in his essay titled The Theory of Affordances. In this essay Gibson attempts to explain what guides an individual’s use of objects in particular ways. For Gibson, an affordance is the possibility for action an object contains. In creating this definition, Gibson builds on the theories of Wittgenstein and Kofka, by proposing that affordances are defined by perception not by classification.

Although the use of certain affordances relies on the perception of them, Gibson (1979) notes that the affordances of an object are invariable and always present regardless of whether the observer perceives it or not. The term affordance is widely used in psychological literature and has also crossed over into social studies of technology and SNS more specifically. In this sense, the term affordance is used to invoke the possibilities of a technology to facilitate certain behaviours and actions. However, as Gibson argues, these affordances only matter because the user sees and understands them. Unlike the


² While these first two research questions might imply a temporal examination of the friendship and the self, doing so with original empirical material is beyond the scope of this thesis. Instead these questions are posed in relation to the present context, in which is assumed that Facebook has a transformative effect on our friendships and the presentation of the self.
static object described by Gibson, the affordances of an SNS can change over time sometimes to offer more possibilities for action, or less. SNS are not static objects, but are also spaces that are shaped by the interests of the capital that creates them and the users who inhabit them. Asking what affordance Facebook has, leads to my final research questions:

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  How can Facebook be understood and conceptualised as a space?