Matthew Allen

Klastrup, Facebook and storytelling

Focuses here on status updates – this is a form of story telling; narratological analysis

Why is social story telling important?
storytelling – production of self in the act of telling the story;
Social identity theory – not identity per se, but identification processes
Storytelling as rhetorical act of the self

Compares old homepage, and new – the Facebook page.
Compoares social storytelling to soap opera – mundane, ordinary, open-ended, realtime

Reception of facebook – like “fly on the wall” involvement; intimate; production of facebook – local, collaborative. Formats – episodic (closed – nothing else is going to be added; but invites comments from others), dramatic, (open – eg more is going to come; teasers, rolling updates); negotiable (actual – as in conscious writing of stories; and the comments guide the responses)

Decoding social stories = filling in the gaps; + what else is going on via the site. reading the clues of site into the interpretation of status update.

diagram – identity expression (“our need to organise and tell our experiences”) + Group cultures + software design = creating fraemworks of production and reception. – distinguishes telling and sharing, but they are two aspects of the same.

Raynes-Goldie, Privacy and Facebook
(disclosure, R-G is Curtin graduate student)

Focus in young people – do they care about privacy? no, but… . they did, just not in the same way. Describes the basis of her research.

Summarises the ‘realness’ of Facebook – increasing “efficiency and transparency” of communication (Zuckerberg); summarising the way Facebook changes; how it used to be a closed network, now open; and there’s a social cost to non-participation.

Institutional and Social privacy compared; asserts that the normative reading of privacy is – keeping things from institutions who might exploit our personal information for their gain; the other reading is social – who will be the audience, in a social space, for the information which we might consider personal.

Lack of identity control – people can post to wall, tag photos which then appear on your profile (and this is especially true for photos). Key to it “context collision” – several examples of how there are people in the ’space’ of Facebook who, from the perspective of a user, should not be there. [Lack of spatial regulatory capacity?] Also some technical issues which affect privacy.

[Is privacy management behaviour by Facebook users itself a form of identity play and negotiation? Also, especially could be seen as negotiating the boundaries of public and private performance - learning what is appropriate]

Milner, Online Agonism

Facebook links to Public Sphere; focus here is on FB app “pieces of flair” (a button making app for swapping back and forth)

sums public sphere – one model is trust based, community etc (eg Dewey); another model (mouffe) is agonism – that is “political and social rifts are to be encouraged” – eg hae debate and disagreement, but keep them in public sphere so as to create possibilities for consensus. Probably both of these occur at once?

So apply this to Facebook, via the PoF application, looking specifically at 2008 USPrez race. It’s about the management of social and cultural identities. FB about discussion, but also representing their own political ideologies and commenting on others. [remember, buttons are US-centric].

“prevalence, intensity and reductionism” of the flair; massively othering – sexist, racist. Medium of flair creates this – have to be small and inyourface? – and massive audience because of the reach and network of Facebook. PROBABLY conclusion – you can’t have productive agonism WITHOUT trust…so PS requires both.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 11th, 2009 at 00:37 and is filed under Conferences, Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.