[Air-L] Grooming, Gossip, Facebook and Myspace: What Can We Learn About Social Networking Sites from Non-Users etc.

[Zeynep Tufekci]

Hi All,

I just wanted to share two papers about SNS (responding to danah's
call). One of them, "Can You See Me Now? Audience and Disclosure
Regulation in Online Social Network Sites,"
is at the pre-publication state and is available here:
http://userpages.umbc.edu/~zeynep/papers/ZeynepCanYouSeeMeNowBSTS.pdf.
The other is under review so I've included only the abstract below.
Please send me an email if you would like a copy of that paper when I
start circulating it.

Cheers,
-z

Grooming, Gossip, Facebook and Myspace: What Can We Learn About Social
Networking Sites from Non-Users

This paper attempts to understand the rapid adoption of social
networking sites by students on U.S. college campuses. Locating these
online tools within the emergence of social computing, a conceptual
distinction is made between the expressive Internet, the Internet of
social interactions, and the instrumental Internet, the Internet of
airline tickets and weather forecasts. Starting with the theoretical
frameworks of Robin Dunbar and Erving Goffman, this paper situates the
activity on these sites under two rubrics: 1) presentation of the self
and impression management, and 2) social grooming. The study compares
and contrasts user and non-user populations in terms of expressive and
instrumental Internet use, friendship ties, attitudes toward
social-grooming, general curiosity about people, enjoyment of keeping
in touch and of social activities, concern for privacy, and other
variables hypothesized to be linked to social network site adoption
based on qualitative (n=35) and quantitative data (n=714). Three
clusters are found to influence social network site adoption:
disposition towards social grooming, disposition towards conformity,
and privacy concerns. We especially find that non-users display an
attitude towards social grooming (gossip, small-talk, and generalized,
non-functional people-curiosity) that ranges from incredulous to
hostile. Contrary to expectations, however, non-users do not report a
smaller number of very close or somewhat close friends compared to
users, but they do keep in touch with fewer people. Users of social
networking sites tend to be heavier users of the expressive Internet,
while there is no difference in non-social uses on the instrumental
Internet, highlighting the need to differentiate between the different
modalities of Internet use when examining social impacts.


Keywords: social network sites, Goffman, Dunbar, presentation of the
self, social grooming, Facebook, Myspace