Into the Neverlands

Looking at the research done on social network sites compiled by danah boyd along with other researchers, it seems to me that two main categories covering the subject are the social aspect (mostly focusing on reconceptualising 'friends' and the extension of our social life onto SNS) and privacy/surveillance issues. Much is also being done on teens - mostly probably due to the fact that MySpace managed to draw significant numbers of them.

I'm currently reading Bruno Latour's The Invisible City and looking at his introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. While the application of Latour in SNS research might bring about some perils (and Latour is warning on keeping a certain distance with social networks as such when looking at ANT), what interests me in his corpus is the questioning of what is social - 'a peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling' ¹ (Latour 2005: 7).

It seems to me that with the emergence of social networks much research focused on (re)presentation issues and performing identities, to quote boyd. However, the move most probably was inevitable, particularly with young people building their spaces online, as teen culture is inextricable from identity issues. On the other hand, with the growing age of SNS members (due to their borders expanding and due to teens growing up on SNS), I am wondering which way the research will proceed in the next couple of years. I suppose, much of it will still scrutinise identity issues as SNS have become home to those who might be considered as being on the fringes of the conventional.

Nonetheless, what else is there to SNS besides profile and wall analysis and where is that analysis? It is a question I have been asking myself trying to embark on the research and methodologies that could follow the exponential nature of the Web and evolve along with it. The reason I am questioning this is because it seems to me that much the academic research on SNS comes to conclusions that my 13-year-old niece who is a devotee of Bebo could have explained after a few weeks of hanging out there. If SNS are becoming the extension of our social worlds (or turning into alternative ones - depending on which standpoint you support), we need to broaden our scope. The kids are challenging us.


Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-network-theory, Oxford University Press.

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It seems like I wasn't beating around the bush with the post on privacy settings on Facebook. danah boyd calls them 'the most flexible and the most confusing privacy settings in the industry' yet she maintains that many Facebookers don't realise their flexibility.

Howeer, she also points out that privacy settings should be about awareness and context besides the possibility of control. In other words, ideally each time we tag somebody in a photo it would be pleasant to know who can view it and customise that.

Another exceptionally good distinction regarding privacy is made by Clay Shirky - the fact that between private and public personal has disappeared. He gives an example of having a chat with a stranger in a park - it is not a private act, yet not a public one either. Shirky points out that nowadays we mostly tend to use the word personal when we refer to technology.

In this respect and with the growing popularity of SNS and the being online which in fact is increasingly becoming doing online as our presence on the Net is becoming increasingly participatory by chatting, linking, commenting, tagging, embedding, posting, twittering, it seems that our previous understanding of what is private is irreversibly changing. I can observe two camps emerging: those who try to keep at least a minuscule amount of privacy while participating in the creation of Semantic Web and those who seemingly are no longer concerned with privacy. Nowadays posting information online and hoping to keep it private is a bit like having an affair at work - mostly it gets exposed anyway.

My suggestion for those worried instead of evoking notions of Big Brother would be to think twice before posting anything. And read privacy settings beforehand. And enjoy this data whirlpool which lurkers will never understand.

On the other hand, the privacy issue that worries many is the fact that other Facebookers can upload pictures with you without prior notice. It is possible to detag oneself if others have tagged you and even report the photo for nudity or pornography/drug use/violence/attacks individual or group, yet Facebook warns that they 'will NOT remove photos just because they're unflattering'. I guess, it means say cheese?..

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After finally managing to convince a friend of mine who lives in Dublin to get on Facebook (primarily in order to stay in touch), low and behold I discovered that she quietly vanished off the face of Facebook. I didn't get a notification about that...

Previously I was told that disappearing from this social network site is not as easy as joining it and I was presuming that deletion of one's account is not possible. Deletion for users indeed is not possible. But deactivation is.



And you must love Facebook for the possible options given:

I don't feel safe on the site.
I spend too much time using Facebook.
I have another Facebook account.
This is temporary. I'll be back.
I need to fix something in my account.
I don't understand how to use the site.
I receive too many emails from Facebook.
I don't find Facebook useful.
Facebook is resulting in social drama for me.
Other [please explain further].


Unlike Facebook, MySpace allows to cancel the account and in that case the cancellation is irreversible.

So I had two news for my friend: firstly, she indeed became invisible. Yet, secondly, the traces were still there...

However, complete deletion of one's profile is possible, although one has to contact Facebook on that. Before that (and before the deactivation) it is requested to remove any profile content distributed on Facebook: sent and received messages, friends, comments/posts on all of your walls, comments/posts on other peoples walls, all your photos, you will have to leave all the networks and groups, transfer the admin rights to someone else, clear every last bit of information from your profile. Then contacting Facebook and if no traces are left - voila, you will be deleted. At least that is what it sounds, I wonder if anybody has experiences with this.

One of the reasons I came across deactivation/deletion matters was because I was looking whether it was possible to restrict one's profile to being visible only to friends as my newbie Facebook friend was getting worried about privacy. I told her that the Internet is the wrong place to be if one is after privacy, yet it seems that Facebook is flexible enough - it is possible to make one's profile/basic info/personal info/status updates/friends less accessible to the general lurker audience - even though one needs to research a bit on that as an average Joe 6 pack might not find it that easy.

On the other hand, I was wondering about the photos with me on other people's albums - these are out of my control. Vanishing nowadays has become quite complicated...

My conclusion so far is that there is plenty of gossip around about SNS, which is oftentimes based on customised settings, and the only way to come up with answers is to look for them.

I'm thinking whether I can convince my friend to come back... Not that Facebook is the love of my life, but I'd like to see my friend more often. At least on Facebook.

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It is unimaginable to study the new media without creating something within them. So I embarked on a new project today creating a network on Ning for Lithuanians studying and academics working abroad (it's in Lithuanian, so you don't necessarily have to head there).

The main reason for a social network of this kind was the fact that since we are a relatively small country and the numbers of students and academics heading abroad have been rapidly increasing, it has become hard to find them all in one place, get in touch and see what others have been working on. Moreover, there was a notion of patriotism tingling somewhere in the back of my head as academics previously have played a substantial role in establishing the country in the late 1910s and later on in restoring the independence and starting everything from the scratch again in 1990s. As a fellow student of mine told me a few months ago, when one comes from a minute and young country, one has a feasible chance to make some sort of a difference. Perhaps...

Anyhow, setting up a network on Ning allowed me to start getting some idea on how this budding social network(ing) site is working. While danah boyd and Nicole Ellison define
MySpace and FaceBook as social network sites that embed the social networks their users have developed prior to joining them, the developments I have noticed on Ning allow to erase the parentheses and consider the attempt to networking. The matter that interests me most is the nature of the networking and the threads that emerge within this practice.


The first look and in particular at the last results of the searches reveals that there is a lot of solitude on the networks launched on Ning yet - many of them, particularly the ones with the generic sky blue icon are networks of one person still. This poses two possible explanations - either that is because of Ning's relative novelty and the networks need some time develop or the fact that the people joining Ning consider the platform a possibility to establish a room of their own on the Web, which puts the practice of networking in a different and possibly questionable perspective.

Ning co-founder and CEO Gina Bianchini says that 65 percent of Ning's 500 000 social networks are being actively used with a new one springing up every 30 seconds. Since I managed to erase my bookmarks where I believe I had world-wide figures, I am left with the ones from the States and according to Nielsen Online, Ning's year-over-year audience's growth for September was the third largest one after Twitter and Tagged among social network(ing) sites - 343%, 330% and 251% respectively. Ning had 2,955 mln users compared to Twitter's 2,36 mln and Tagged's 3,86 mln. On the average that leaves with 6 people per each Ning network, although, as I have said, many of the ones I found were still underdeveloped and included only one person (and since they were not updated regularly with posts, photographs or videos didn't function as blogs either). The cemetery of attempts... However, some of the more popular ones (a feature Ning offers by random order?), such as I see color have over 60 000 members.

Interestingly, during one of my first encounters with Ning, I randomly searched for networks revolving around the axis of adult-content trying to see whether sex indeed is the forbidden fruit we are all after in the virtual (the first question my avatar was asked on Second Life was 'So, do you wanna have sex?').

While the official Ning blog claims that adult-oriented networks must have a warning page and that they don’t show up in the search results on Ning.com, a quick search by entering various words for male/female genitalia results in dozens of raunchy networks and one doesn't have to look far to find those that are public, appear on the search results and have no warning pages about adult-oriented content.

Since Ning's main money making machine is GoogleAds, such networks have become a cause of serious headache and as of the 1st of January, as Ning blog states, they will no longer support adult social networks on the Ning platform.

From what I have observed so far, it seems that Ning is first of all becoming an ethnographic case study of what Hugo Liu calls taste performance. Unlike FaceBook where the textual plays a major role in displaying one's profile and the bonds with the other users, Ning like MySpace offers the possibility to manipulate the template visually - a feature that in MySpace serves a major tool in constructing one's space. However, while MySpace and FaceBook firstly serve as quintessential platforms for 'friending' rather than making connections with strangers (I find FaceBook more like a pin-up board), the networking priority on Ning is questionable, as solitary notworking is still very evident. It will be interesting to observe whether Ning will evolve into a networking platform and how it will continue to develop. And I will let you know whether my network will develop into a networking practise or I will be doomed for solitude.

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