2/26/2024 0 Comments Facebook friends list order 2011Furthermore, besides “context collapse”, the users of Facebook and other platforms need to accept the omnopticon of social media, i.e., the state of continuous mutual surveillance where every user acts both as agent and subject (Linaa Jensen, 2010). Hence, the user of SNS, like Facebook for example, needs to “contend with groups of people they do not normally bring together, such as acquaintances, friends, co-workers and family” not to mention total strangers. Still, social media environments host a great variety of individuals with different socio–demographic backgrounds, lifestyles, and aims. In other words, users end up creating an “ideal audience”, (Marwick and boyd, 2010) as viewers and readers of their profiles. Therefore, rather than constructing an imagined audience of the site as a whole, users are often focused on addressing the members of their own friends’ lists in their posts. Empirical studies suggest that peers and close friends are most often viewed upon as sources for reference, their preferences and practices are noted when selecting the “markers of cool” (Liu, 2007) worthy to be put in one’s profile. Research on social media - e.g., SNS (Siibak, 2009a 2009b boyd, 2006) dating sites (Ellison, et al., 2006 Whitty, 2008), blogs (Hodkinson and Lincoln, 2008 Stefanone and Jang, 2007) and micro–blogging sites (Marwick and boyd, 2010) - suggests that users are very attentive to audience and often “take cues from the social environment to imagine the community”. Although the audience is always imagined in every communicative act, people engaged in social media environments lack information about their audience and thus “it is often difficult to determine how to behave, let alone to make adjustments based on assessing reactions”. In comparison to classical unmediated publics and public places (parks, streets, cafes), social media can be distinguished by four main aspects: persistence of information, searchability, replicability and invisible audiences (boyd, 2007). When we examine social media, we are essentially treating mediated publics. In focus group discussions that followed the drawing task, young people gave verbal explanations of their drawings and described their perceptions about typical Facebook usage practices of emerged user types. High school students from Estonia were asked to draw sketches of user types that they considered to be prevalent on Facebook. The aim of this paper is to analyze the perceptions that Estonian youth have about the imagined audience (Marwick and boyd, 2010) of Facebook. Hence, in many respects, young people perceive Facebook to be a ‘walled garden’, occupied only by a certain group of individuals.Ĭonsidering the fact that the majority of studies about Facebook so far have also used student or teen samples (for example, Debatin, et al., 2009 Tufecki, 2008 Walther, et al., 2008) and thus (un)consciously helped to confirm the latter perception, we set out to investigate what kind of individuals the young perceive to be users of Facebook. also indicate that young users of Facebook consider their close online connections and peers as the main audience of their Facebook posts. As an average Facebook user has 130 friends (Facebook, 2011), and empirical studies indicate even larger circles of friends for student users of Facebook (Walther, et al., 2008 Vanden Boogart, 2006), the findings seem to suggest that young profile owners of Facebook imagine the ideal audience of the site as ‘the mirror–image of the user’. The latter assumption might have been induced by the fact that some join Facebook mainly in order to stay in touch with friends and acquaintances (Livingstone and Haddon, 2009 boyd, 2008 Subrahmanyam, et al., 2008). For example, in 2008 the majority of young users of Facebook perceived it to be a “‘student–only’ site”. In fact, young people are so actively engaged in SNS that some consider SNS as “‘their’ space, visible to the peer group more than to adult surveillance”. Previous research (Lenhart and Madden, 2007 Bruns, 2006) has found that young people are the striving force behind social media, in particular social networking sites (SNS). From the total of six prevalent user types and sub–types that emerged, just one user type could be considered representative of an ideal audience on Facebook in the eyes of youth. Students’ sketches ( N=39) and reflections on focus group interviews indicate that the youth are well aware of the plurality of the imagined audience on Facebook. This paper analyses Estonian high–school students ( N=15) perceptions about the imagined audience on Facebook. The imagined audience on Facebook: Analysis of Estonian teen sketches about typical Facebook users
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