Yesterday I attended what was probably the first gathering of researchers investigating Facebook, hosted by the London Knowledge Lab. The half day symposium was introduced by Neil Selwyn; he suggested that Facebook was a useful way in to the Web 2.0 debate, and outlined key areas for examination, namely: the reconfiguration of production and consumption relations (after Beer & Burrows, 2007), democratisation debates, and our notions of public and private. This latter theme in particular was touched on by other presenters, and much-discussed during the afternoon.
Tom Broughton & Heather People from Human Capital set the context with a journey through the statistics, designed to investigate the veracity of 6 common assumptions about Facebook. Some were upheld: it is driven by female users, especially in the 25-34 year old category (this age range in general were responsible for 1% of use in August 2006, and now accounts for over half); it is increasingly not dominated by undergraduates – interestingly, their use has fallen over the same period from over half to around a quarter. The broad picture seems to be: Facebook is the most popular social networking site; use amongst 25-34 year olds is growing; there is a ‘lifecycle’ of use.
Sonia Livingstone presented fascinating reusults from work she has been doing with teenagers about their use of social netorking sites. What struck me from her presentation was what we underestimate and overestimate about young people – it seems we overestinate their technological ’savvy’ (they showed confusion over privacy settings for example) but underestimate their ability to differentiate between technologies for different purposes (they were clear that ‘private stuff’ was done elsewhere (via text, email or instant messaging, for example).
The final session was a lively debate about the ethics of researching Facebook – much of which was similar to the ‘informed consent’ debates about doing other kinds of online research. What struck me in particular was how earnestly we were scrutinising oursleves and our own research (practices), yet how little regard both Facebook and its millions of users pay to this issue; it seems that – until breached – users pay scant regard to the ethical use of and/or (perceived) privacy status of their material. The recent Oxford undergraduate case and an earlier Guardian reprinting of posts to one of their message boards are evidence of this.
Finally, stange fact of the day: there is an Official Cambridge Facebook Song (On The Facebook), which can be found, of course, on YouTube.
Presentations & relevant papers from the symposium will be on the London Knowledge lab’s website shortly.
