The Good and the Bad of SNSs.

In the last 3 years, SNS (social networkding sites), have rapidly grown in popularity among internet users worldwide. Frindster, the original social networking application, was founded in 2002, currently has a user base of seventeen million people, and subsequently spawned a small industry. Some of these websites like My Space and The Facebook have surpasses Frendster in popularity. All of these applications are generally based on a common idea drawn from social networking analysis: that publicly articulated social networks have utility. That is, enabling actors to codify, map and view the relational ties between themselves and others can have useful and positive consequences. SNSs are designed specifically to facilitate user interaction for a variety of goals, mainly dating, business networking, and promotion. However, I maintain that the current generation of social networking software is problematic in several ways, particularly involving the types of self-representation priviliaged within the applications. The types of self-representation strategies that the applications allow are directly influenced by the sites' commercial purposes rather than uses needs. As a result, users deploy a variety of strategies in order to increase the utility of the networkds and circumvent these commerical-drived assumptions.

A SNS allows the users to publicly show their personal profile informations, such of them being current relationship status, friends, work etc. Also most SNSs include community features that allow users to converse about shared activities or interestes. A popular SNS called My Space encourages communities and promotional profiles, is faster and more reliable, and has a sleeker and cleaner design compared to other SNSs. It also features a more flexible and more variety in customization in profile creation, changing the background and font colour and size, embedding songs and movies. Identity presentation within social networking applications takes place primarily within highly structured, multi-modal user profiles. In order to fully understand this presentation, I will use Irving Goffman's theories of 'front' and 'backstage' performances in analysing the scenarios in which a face is presented publicly. 'Backstage' performances, on the other hand, take place in private spaces reserved for group members. For example, students might present a 'fron stage' identity in class, but present 'back stage' while hanging out with other students afterwards. In SNSs the 'front stage' performance of identity takes place through profiles, while additional identity information may be conveyed through private messages, emails or personal meetings. However because this information is 'back stage' it is not available to the casual observer. Information about the users identity can also be gleaned contextually from the other members of the user's publicly articulated network, but this is dependent both on the information that the other members of the network make public, and how the observer reads the network. Hense user self-presentation is limited to profile construction. Social networking applications do not take into account critiques of social networking analysis that clain it de-contextualizes relationships and social actions from their cultural, discursive and normative frameworks.

SNSs ignores both human action and external influences on social networkds, such as culture, polutucal discourse and social norms. Human relationships are able to map to larger political, social and cultureal norms, these are removed from the publicly articulated networkds drawn within SNS. Discursive frameworks and cultural maps are equally as powerful as social networks, and indeed limit or enable the actions of individual people as much as the network itself does. Assuming that social networks are discretely explanatory for human behaviour, then ignores not only the influence of systemic power relations related to gender, sexuality, race, class and so on on behaviour, but also how the subject's own ability for empirical action is influenced by the larger interrelated contect in which he or she is situated.