From Networked Publics to MySpace and Facebook

A networked public is both the space constructed through networked

technologies and the people who are connected by those technologies. Genres of social media that produce spaces for publics to emerge are themselves networked publics. Although the most popular forms of social media are primarily about connecting individuals or small groups (e.g., instant messaging, text messaging), networked publics capture the social imagination by suggesting an alternative organization of society. Usenet, chatrooms, the blogosphere, and social network sites are all networked publics that allow people to gather, share, and converse. The

structure of these spaces suggests that people can connect with others like them across social and geographic divisions. This, in fact, is the crux of the techno-utopian

dream. My interest in networked publics stems from a fascination with the

differences between what is imagined as possible and what people actually do when they gather in and create public spaces online.

My project focused broadly on networked publics. When I began, two blog/journal communities—Xanga and LiveJournal—were the most popular mediated spaces in which teens gathered. As teens grew enamored with MySpace and, later, Facebook, I followed them. Quickly, MySpace and Facebook played a much more central role in teens’ lives than Xanga and LiveJournal ever did.

MySpace and Facebook became the dominant mediated site for my fieldwork simply because they dominated teens’ attention.

Temporally, my fieldwork traced the rise of MySpace. When I began observing youth practice in late 2004, only a handful of teens had adopted MySpace, but it quickly became the most popular networked public space in which American teens gathered. Midway through my fieldwork, Facebook started to take off and capture the imagination of American teens. I followed this phenomenon as well. By the end of my fieldwork, Facebook had become a significant competitor to MySpace and MySpace’s status among teens had begun to fade.

MySpace and Facebook both host profiles for millions of American teenagers. It is impossible to follow every teen who uses these sites so I developed strategies for following different cultural dynamics that took place without following all

participants. On MySpace, I used a random sample of user profiles as entry points

and followed the Friend networks to get a sense of the topology. Because MySpace’s profiles are linked to numerical user IDs, I was able to use a random-number

generator to select a subset of profiles to view. Some of these had been deleted and others were bands—I ignored these. With the help of MySpace, I viewed the rest and analyzed all that were most likely teenagers. I did not keep quantitative measures of those that I discarded, as my goal was purely to get a random sample of teen profiles.

Because of differences in structure and access, it was not possible to get a random sample of Facebook profiles. Instead, I made accounts in different regional networks and started with a sample of teens who made their profiles visible to these networks. I could view their Friends’ lists, but I could often not view their Friends’

profiles. My sample on Facebook was very limited and unrepresentative but, at the time, I was less concerned with Facebook profiles because the options for self-expression were more limited and fewer teens were engaged there. Only at the end of my fieldwork did I come to consider my lack of access as a limiting factor.

As a participant on these sites, I was connected to friends, colleagues, and peers;

this participation provided an entirely different angle for understanding these sites.

As a member of different technology circles, I also had access to the business side of these companies, providing yet another vantage point. While these sites became a core focus of my fieldwork, challenges in collecting data also complicated my work.

The semi-public nature of networked publics gave me a window into teens’ lives, but

it also taught me that the limited view is often misleading. As I will discuss later, access and visibility became core methodological challenges.

Throughout my fieldwork, I tracked other forms of social media and networked publics. I kept tabs on older genres that were once fairly popular with teens,

including chatrooms and blogs. I followed media-sharing services as communities began to form around them. Yet while sites like YouTube gained tremendous popularity among youth, teens predominantly used them as content-access and distribution tools rather than networked publics. Many pundits argued that the next teen fad would be immersive 3D worlds like Second Life and massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft, but no mass adoption took place while I was doing fieldwork. I observed teen practice in and interviewed them about a wide array of networked publics, but MySpace and Facebook were the stable crux of teen participation.

MySpace and Facebook serve as crucial case studies throughout my dissertation.¹ MySpace and Facebook allowed me to observe traces of a variety of teens and their peers in a highly mediated environment. These tools gave me a window into aspects of many teens’ lives, but the picture was always partial and slanted. While there are significant limitations to what I could watch through MySpace and Facebook, these sites allowed me to observe teens from all over the United States. Such access

1 Chapter 3 documents the history of these sites and places them into a broader context of social media; Appendix 2 details specific site features so that readers can follow the discussion even if they are not familiar with the specific sites.

provided valuable insights into the cultural dynamics of specific places, which, in turn, helped me as I began interviewing throughout the country.