Thesis Title: Subtitle

Introduction

This chapter builds on the work of the previous two chapters, which have examined friendship and self-presentation as they relate to Facebook. Examining these two aspects have allowed me to begin to draw a picture of what type of space Facebook might be. For the participants in the present research, Facebook is a place to keep up with the movements of friends and others they care about, however it does not supplement or replace other modes of interactions, including face-to-face communication. Nor has Facebook radically changed the way the participants in this research conceived and spoke about their friendships.

Chapter Five examined how participants understood their self-presentation on Facebook. The self- presentation practices found in this research were rather constrained and participants stated that they perceived the instrumental functions of Facebook (such as its ability to effectively share and seek information) were more important that its affordances for more expressive self-presentation. In Chapter Five I argued that this is because Facebook is unique among online environments because it ties a disembodied presence to a real, locatable body through which self-presentation claims can be falsified and measured. These findings provide the basis for the argument of this chapter, namely that Facebook can be best understood as a parochial space akin to a pre-modern village square in which users interact with known and familiar others. This chapter commences with a theoretical discussion on de Certeau’s (1984) work concerning the production of space, and goes on to examine how this theory is played out, firstly by examining Facebook’s architecture and then by examining users’ accounts.

In this chapter, I conceptualise Facebook as both a place and a space – an abstract space created by capital, rather than an organic space by users for their own purposes. The relationship between space and capital is well known (Lefebvre 1991; Gottdiener 2000). The argument that capital produces physical spaces like shopping centres and other infrastructure is not new. This is now readily apparent in the digital realm as well on sites like Facebook. While this presents an interesting line of inquiry, further theorising the relationship between capital and abstract space online is outside of the scope of the argument I am presenting here. The relationship that is at the centre of this chapter is between abstract space and those who use it. I argue that abstract space can be resisted and re-shaped in similar ways to modern urban environments and that people demonstrate agency, as de Certeau’s (1984) ^{‘walkers’ in reshaping both how space is used to ‘get around’, but also in how social} relations are formed, maintained, ordered and sustained. Further, I seek to clarify what kind of space Facebook is, suggesting that it is something other than the public space that writers such as boyd (2011) suggest.
Using insights from my empirical work, this chapter discusses how to conceptualise Facebook as a space. From this, I argue that it can be usually compared to a ‘village square’ where relationships are largely parochial (or ‘homophilic’) and that there is little of the public realm or the stranger about Facebook. This is a conceptualisation of Facebook that much of the previous literature has not identified. Although Facebook potentially gives the comfort of Tönnies’ (1991) gemeinschaft village square, which is increasingly missing for many contemporary urban dwellers in late modernity, I argue that Facebook does have some important differences from this pre-modern ideal. In Facebook, relationships are formed, ordered and sustained by users at the dictates of Facebook’s architecture and the reflexive preferences of the user, a process that can be understood in terms of de Certeau’s analogy of walking the city. Like the city, Facebook has no content of its own whatsoever; those who use the service create the content. Creating a place is one ^{matter, but rooms need to be furnished, and cities need to be inhabited before one can} begin to say substantive things about those places. The creating of a social space is dependent on those who use the place and how they chose to use it. In this case, users create the ambience of Facebook.