Facework on facebook: the presentation of self in virtual life
Article Details
P01547: Language, culture and communication in online learning Noamgalai: 'Socializing' ‘Face work’ in Facebook: An analysis of an online discourse community. Tony McNeill, April 2008.
Article Excerpt
"A growing area of interest amongst some academics is the culture of SNS (boyd 2007; boyd & Ellison 2008; Ellison et al. 2007; Liu 2008; Merchant 2006; Selwyn 2007; Stutzman 2005). According to Stutzman (2005), undergraduates use Facebook to ‘hang out’, to shoot the breeze, waste time, to learn about each other or simply as a directory. Students often use Facebook as a means of managing their social lives; staying in touch, organising nights out and the like. However, Guy Merchant’s writing on the culture of SNS, influenced by sociologists like Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman, has drawn attention to the use of sites such as Facebook to produce and perform “an ongoing narrative of the self” (2006, p.238). So, Facebook pages and communications are as much about the construction of a dynamic story of the self as that self interacts with various social contexts as they are about arranging going out clubbing. Hugh Liu’s work is an interesting addition to this line of inquiry and highlights the role of SNS profile pages as the location for ‘taste performances’ (2008) that define and distinguish social identity" (page 6).
