A networked self

I have been doing some more reading, concentrating on the internet and how people interact on it. One of the 3 books I took out is:

A Networked Self: Identity, Community and Culture on Social Networking Sites

Edited by Zizi Papacharissi (2011)

Oxon, Routledge

Here is some of the information I found:

General internet information:

-       An experiment was conducted to see if the random nature of the internet meant we networked in different ways. The results showed very similar searches/sites and sites like Google etc, act like Hubs (like large airports)

-       Media convergence- people can watch videos while chatting on Instant Messenger services

-       There is also simultaneous communication on mass and interpersonal media (eg. Reading an article on a newspaper website, while chatting on msn, while reading the same issue on a blog and then looking at the comments on the post.)

-       The manner of reception alters peoples relationship/communication online, either through mis-representation, processing filters or biases.

Facebook information:

-       Not just group identification and social idenities, but we can see what an individual person is doing/ where they are.

-       The average facebook user has 250-275 friends compared to 10-20 close friends in traditional relationships.

-       Someone can co-create a facebook profile by posting a comment on someones timeline. Could it have an influence on how people see you? (posting gossip, embarrassing comments or drunken pictures)

-       Facebook wall posts: are they affected knowing that a personal message is made public not just to your friends, but their friends? Eg. Exclusivity language, types of pictures you post, self-promotion.

Group dynamics online:

-       Do comments from other users affect the perception of the material, eg. Youtube video? And does the lack of identity/ personal information on Youtube affect the type of comments posted.

-       In an experiment: people preferred people recommended stories online than editors choice, features etc.

Let the reading commence...

For the project to have substance, we decided that we need to look at more academic texts and to really understand the issues we are tackling. I took the social dynamics, specifically looking at online presences and theories as my topic of research. The first book I looked at was:

Identity in Britain: A cradle-to-grave atlas

Bethan Thomas and Daniel Dorling 2007

The Policy Press

Bristol

The identity chapter looked at how people are identified  in general:

People are normally identified by (in order):

gender

age

role (in families- mother, sister, daughter and in work- friend, colleague, boss or mate, lover, acquaintance)

nationality (English)

racial

social class

geographical location

occupation

religion

An interesting term found was The Human Mosaic. It looks at the different levels of humans and locations in the world, from an individual to a crowd to a stadium, to the city, to the area, to the country etc.

(“Each place is a story of thousands of stories, a composite, collage, collection, a human mosaic”)

This could be used for the name or just use this theory to help structure our project.