Who You Talkin' To?

The idea that intrigued me the most this week was boyd’s concept of the “flattening” of social networks on social networking sites and the tension that creates in managing one’s presentation and performance between disparate groups. After reading this week’s articles, I took a “fieldtrip” through Facebook, jumping around the pages of a number of teenagers / young adults in the networks of a young person I know. While most of the users were high school students, thus not yet faced with having to present very “professional” images to anyone (except, perhaps conscientious college admissions staff), I observed this tension on the page of one young woman who graduated from college last year and is now working for a communications company. Her active networks included friends from high school, college, and her new job. While her profile was appropriately “casual professional,” I noticed that some of her friends’ postings seemed a bit informal and suggestive to be comfortably viewed by a work audience. I wondered if such rocky junctures would naturally be worn down as everyone in her networks got older and into the work world, or it would be advantageous to have separate sites for different audiences where one could be more free to maintain a forum for personal and informal communication (although Facebook seems to be moving in the other direction by expanding out from schools to the wider world).

The other concept from the readings that I observed on my online fieldtrip was the finding that Facebook was useful in building maintained social capital. The networks I explored were mostly made up of high school seniors and college freshmen (who graduated last June from the high schools where the current high school students still were). I noticed quite a bit of communication between those groups – originally geographically connected -- while the college freshman had already established substantial networks at their new schools. This phenomenon, as well as the findings that use of social networking environments supports the generation and maintenance of bridging social capital, seems potentially useful for the building of a youth civic network. By designing opportunities for such online networking across diverse existing school, organizational and neighborhood networks, I hope facilitate the creation and maintenance of weak ties that could lead to sustained civic communication and action.