Last week I began what I expect to be a long undertaking: familiarizing myself with the existing academic research on social network sites in particular and social media in general. Last week, I focused on Eszter Hargittai’s work, largely because I stumbled across her work first, which inspired this project.
But as I’ve read more, I have come to realize that Hargittai’s work probably wasn’t the best starting point. A better starting point would be more foundational work on the purpose and importance of social network sites.
This is a task that is simultaneously important and difficult for me. Having graduated high school in 2004, I am among the very first cohort of Facebook users. As such, my entire college experience–and consequently much of my worldview–has been shaped by the presence of that site. This has provided me with an intuitive understanding of the practical importance of SNSs.
As in any field, intuitive understanding can also have its downsides. To that end, my experience has made it difficult for me to imagine a world without such sites, so I will have to take extra care to explain things that may not be so obvious to others. Finding the right medium between clarity and tedium is going to be an important task.
Fortunately, I’ve been going further back into the literature, and found an excellent starting point. In October 2007, danah boyd and Nicole Ellison wrote the introduction to a special section of The Journal of Computer Mediated Communication entitled “Social Network Sites: Definition, History and Scholarship“. The article is a literature review, and as such, it covers a lot of ground. But for the purposes of what I’m getting at in this post, there are a couple of important ideas here.
The first is that the sites I am interested in are not, as I’ve often called them, ’social networking sites’. They are instead ’social network sites’. While that may seem like a minor semantic difference, it has important implications. A ’social networking’ site would be a space to meet new people with whom one shares interests. A ’social network’ site is different; these are spaces wherein one can articulate and expand upon their offline social world.
Facebook has long described itself as a ’social utility’, and I was attracted to study it for this reason. Yet in the past, I don’t believe that I have fully understood or articulated exactly what that meant.
The article goes on to further define SNSs, offer a brief history of their brief existence, and summarize much of the (then) existing academic work on the subject. It’s a very interesting article, and I’d encourage you to read the whole thing, but it would probably be unnecessary and derivative for me to summarize a literature review.
Over the coming days and weeks, I plan on writing more on the work of both of these authors. boyd has quickly established herself as a prominent voice in this field of study with her ridiculous productivity, while Ellison’s work with Charles Steinfield and Cliff Lampe has produced a fascinating and diverse body of work in the past few years.
As usual i am following these posts with great interest. I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t a case to be made that these sites create enough positive externalities as to be considered public goods. I’d like to see what you can turn up on this. If they do provide a public good, are we headed in the right direction by forcing them to rely on private sources of revenue?