Anders is missing ”is”: Posting and Prescripts on Facebook

8/14/2019 Anders is missing ”is”: Posting and Prescripts on Facebook.

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Fagerjord, Anders. ”Anders is missing ’is’: Posting and Prescripts on Facebook.” Draft paper for the Internet

Research 9.0. conference. August, 2008.

Anders is missing ”is”:

Posting and Prescripts on Facebook.

ANDERS FAGERJORD, UNIVERSITY OF OSLO.

Since its launch in 2004, Facebook has grown to 100 million members all

over the world . Norway is one of the countries where it has become very popular.

From September 2006, when Facebook opened to users outside U.S. colleges, to

August 2008, Facebook has attracted 1.2 of Norway's 4.7 million inhabitants,

according to Facebook Ads1.There may be many reasons why 2 out of every 9

Norwegians use Facebook. Research on social network sites in general, and

Facebook in particular, have concluded that the main attraction is to keep in touch

with family, friends, and acquaintances. We maintain relationships of different

kinds, as we can get a glimpse of peoples daily lives, as their status updates,

shared pictures, and public comments to their "walls" are broadcast to our

Facebook homepages

At the same time, we can use Facebook to express ourselves. I can express

my opinions in posts, and paint a picture of my daily life in photos and status

updates. Some pictures are carefully constructed, others appear more haphazardly

put together. danah boyd (2007) has related this to Gidden's concept of "impression

management". Other researchers have described the use of social network sites as

part of users' "identity construction" or "performance".These reasons for using

Facebook are plausible and well theorised. But it appears to me that they are not

sufficient to explain the activity on Facebook. One thing is that people use

Facebook to talk. But it seems that Facebook also is providing something to talk

about.

In 2007, Facebook changed the "Status field". The status field is where

members can type what they are doing, sharing their activities, thoughts, or just a





funny phrase with all their friends. Until then, the status field automatically started

with the member's name + "is", like "Anders Fagerjord is ...". For the many

members who do not speak English as their first language, this was a nuisance,

and in the fall of 2007, the 'is' was first removed, and later made optional, so userscould delete it and replace it with another word in any language.

The week the 'is' disappeared, I noticed something peculiar. Of my about

100 friends, the vast majority of status updates were commenting on this redesign.

My friends were reacting to a change in technology as a spur to express

themselves.

I started wondering whether Facebook writing to a large extent is reactions

to or comments upon the technology. Filling in gaps in tests and applications,answering to quizzes, and commenting on the system has its share of activities.

I would like to get a better understanding on how the Facebook technology

lends itself to a certain kind of communication. I ask to what extent Facebook

communication is initiated by system cues.

I am currently in the middle of a quantitative content analysis of Norwegian

Facebook profile "mini feeds". This paper will describe the study, and share results

from a smaller, less formal pilot study of 50 profiles.We are studying three aspects

of user's profiles: their "status updates", their "posted items," and their "mini-

feeds". As mentioned above, the "status update" is a short line of description, that

not only is easy for the user to change, she or he is actively encouraged by

Facebook to change it often. For each user, we are calculating the average number

of status updates per week. We also count how many status updates are

commenting on Facebook, such as, for example, "Anders does not know what to

put in the status field".

In a similar manner, we count the average number of "posts" a user has

written on his profile. A post is any kind of text or link. We have counted these as

initiated by the user, and not by the Facebook technology.

To monitor the activity more closely, we have sampled the mini-feed of





every user in the study. These are collections reports from the Facebook system.

When the user changes his or her "status", posts anything to his or her profile or

someone else's wall, or comments or replies to other users, it is reported on the

mini-feed. On the mini-feed, a user's friends can also read about it any time he orshe adds another friend, joins a group, or adds an "application". Applications are

extra functionality that can be added to a profile, mostly made by third-party

developers. Applications typically ask you to fill in some information about

yourself or your opinions, and compare this information with that added by

friends of yours.

Friends can read mini-feeds, and a user can decide what kind of information

should appear to which groups of friends by changing the security settings. It iseven a possibility to let the feed be visible to anyone, friend or not.

Together with the profile, the mini-feed thus is a record of what a user is

showing to other Facebook users. It is where his or her "impression management"

is played out and recorded.

By studying the mini-feeds, we can see what kind of activity a user is

engaged in, and also how frequently he or she leaves trace on Facebook. As we just

mentioned, a user can choose what to display in the mini-feed and what to leave

out. A cautious user may block most changes from appearing in the mini-feed. We

do not consider that a problem for our study, however. We are interested in

finding what users express to others, and this blocking is part of the performance,

part of choosing what to express.

Studies of social network sites users repeatedly find that social network sites

are important means for being visible to your friends. What is most visible on

Facebook is the mini-feed, and that is the reason why we put so much emphasis on

it.In the pilot study, we have studied 50 profiles, drawn randomly from our own

friends. This sample has been used to construct the codebook, and to get an idea of

the range of variation among the profiles. In the full study, we hope to get about

1000 profiles, which hopefully is a fairly representative sample of Norwegian





Facebook mini-feeds.It is difficult to get a truly random selection of profiles. We

have used Facebook's search engine to find people within the Norway network

who have their profiles open to the whole network. This means that the sample

isn't drawn from all of the 1.2 million Norwegian users, but from a smaller groupof open profiles.

For each user we record the date for the earliest and the latest of the posts,

and calculate the average number of posts per month, to get an impression of their

activity.

An important division is drawn between statements initiated by the user,

statements generated by the Facebook technology. As initiated by the user, we

count status updates, posted texts, links, photos, and videos. We also count the joining of groups and declarations of fandom (i.e., "n.n. is now a fan of Barry

Weldman") as user initiated statements, as we do with events users plan to attend.

Facebook users in our study clearly use groups and fan groups as opportunities to

state opinions and identity. Groups joined by users in our pilot study include

"Cave Diving", "Support the Monks in Burma", and "I bet I can find 1,000,000

people on Facebook who dislike George Bush". Events are a little less obvious, and

many users may in fact join events just as responses to invitations from others.

Still, we believe joining an event is an active statement of interest and social

belonging.

For most users, the different kinds of self-initiated posts is much smaller

than the group we have called "system reports". These are reports that the user has

gotten a new friend or added an application. We do not wish to deny that

expressing friendships and thus agreeing to share information is an important

aspect of identity performance. Those are acts of building community. In this

study, however, we wish to separate network building from other activities for

three reasons: First, networking is the basic operation in an SNS. Without friends,

nothing happens. Second, the posting of different kinds of private "news" is what

sets Facebook apart from earlier network-building sites such as LinkedIn. Third,





getting friends is the beginning. If you do not do anything more than form

friendships, you soon cease to exist from your friends consciousness, we will argue

later.

The third kind of posts is responses. These are quiz results, movie ratings,and other quick responses to applications and tests. We have also included

comments on words or images other users have posted on their profiles, or

comments or responses to public messages others have sent to you, known as

writings on your "wall". We think that to address our research question, whether

Facebook writing is personal expression or reactions to technology, it is relevant to

separate responses from expressions initiated from oneself.

At the time of writing, the results from the more representative study arestill being gathered, but the general impression is that most people do not write

very much. A small proportion is active users who frequently update their status

fields, install new applications, post results of quizzes, and comment upon the

actions of others. Very few ever post texts they have written themselves. Unlike

MySpace, Facebook is generally not used for blogging. Some post photos, very few

ever post videos.

It seems that a typical user has a habit of doing one or two kinds of public

activities, such as updating status, or commenting on other people's walls. She or

he does not do the selected activity every day or every week, but in bursts of a few

days, where several actions are logged. It could be thought of as a "boring days on

the job" phenomenon. I see at least two interesting consequences of these early

findings: It allows us to interpret earlier studies of social network sites, and it says

a little of the role of technology in mediated social networking. Our study is the

first content analysis of Facebook use we have found, and we hope it can

complement the many excellent quantitative and qualitative studies of social

network site users that have been published.

The findings in studies of SNS users are effectively summarised by danah

boyd (2007) in her study of MySpace users. boyd (who spells her name in all





lowercase letters) has found that "teens join MySpace to maintain connections with

their friends" (10). They do this through comments and dialogue, management of

their own profiles, and through browsing the profiles of others.Much of what is

seen is comments. Users have different patterns of use, as we have already seen.Some are eager commentators, leaving remarks on walls and photos most every

day. Most users rarely comment in public, however. It may be that they prefer the

private messages instead; Storsul et al. (2008) found that young Norwegians now use

MSN and Facebook instead of e-mail.Commenting in public seems to be less common

in Norway than many international studies would predict. Still, Norwegian

studies of users find that they too stress that the appeal of Facebook and other

social network sites is to keep up with friends. Most Norwegian users must usemost of their online time browsing the profile pages of others. (In private

conversation, the creators of a couple of Norwegian social network sites told us

participants the same thing: most people browse their friends and the friends of

friends.)

Through browsing, you find others you want to have in your friends list,

and much of the items in the news feeds studied are system reports of new friends

forming.

It stands to reason that your network of friends grows fastest when you first

enter a social network site. After some months, most of the people you know or

want to be connected with will already be in your roster, one should think. In our

analysis, we find that forming of friendships is among the most common post

types. It will be interesting to see if this will change in a few years.Users studied in

earlier works report that they enjoy spending time writing and updating their

profiles. They "manage their impressions" in Goffman's terms. A user profile on

Facebook consists of several parts. It has a section of general information, such as

age, education, workplace, and address. This section is rarely changed.

Information on favourite books, movies, etc. could easily be updated more

frequently, but our impression so far is that it rarely is. Cultural preferences are





instead stated in applications. Users fill in lists of cities visited, music, films,

videos, books, etc. in various forms, and they take part in all kinds of

quizzes.Facebook use is about maintaining social relationships. That could also be

said about the telephone, but compared to the telephone; we see that Facebookadds a lot to the conversation. Facebook invites to certain uses, encourages each

user to fill in certain kinds of information. The way Facebook is designed, its

technology, plays a role in what it is used for.

In earlier work on blog tools, I have used the term 'prescripts' for this kind

of influence from technology . Prescripts are what is written before you begin. To

use Facebook, like many other computer tools for personal expression, is to enter a

dialogic relation to the system. The prescripts suggest topics and ways ofexpression to the user, and the user has to consider whether to do as the prescripts

suggest, or to ignore them in order to express whatever she or he wants to

say.Social networking on the web is about being visible. To be seen, one needs to

write oneself into being. With no updates on your profile, no commenting, no

change, you almost cease to exist on Facebook. It is easy to forget most of the

friends you have given access to read your profile, as you never see them leave

trace on Facebook.

Applications, quizzes, and other profile fields that encourage users to fill in

their tastes and experiences help users to manage their impression to others. In the

terms of Bourdieu, we distinguish ourselves by expressing our tastes, as we link

ourselves to those with similar tastes, and all the same set us apart from those who

prefer other pleasures. When an application asks you to state your preferred films

or your favourite travel destinations, it defines the parameters for your identity.

Each question sets up a small dividing line between you and those with similar

taste, and everyone else. Each question is insignificant, but as they pile up, your

profile becomes clear. Facebook's applications and abundant comment fields,

together with links all over the web encouraging to "share on Facebook" are

welcome suggestions to make users visible to others. For a blogger to be read, he or





she needs to come up with interesting pieces of writing on a regular basis. Millions

of people on the web have the necessary urge to write, and are visible to friends in

the blogosphere. But many more do not have that much they need to get off their

chest. Applications and other pieces of technology on Facebook help the rest of usto remain visible on the social web.



1 I found the number by starting to create an advertisement on Facebook ads,

(<http://www.new.facebook.com/ads/create/>), asking to have it exposed to everyone in

Norway.

Documents

Anders is missing ”is”: Posting and Prescripts on Facebook