technoculture314-09

danah boyd (2007) proposes the idea of ‘networked publics’ in relation to Social Networking Sites in the article Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life. When listening to this week’s lecture, this article came to mind, as I used it in FTVMS312 last semester. I think that it is an interesting way of looking at both social networking sites and at the public sphere.

In the article, boyd (2007) wrestles with what the ‘public’ actually refers to, and the many ambiguities over the subject. In the article, many different meanings of ‘public’ are considered. To define the stance taken on the public in the article, boyd (2007) writes that:

Social network sites allow publics to gather. At the same time, by serving as a
space where speech takes place, they are also publics themselves. The sites
themselves also distinguish between public and private, where public means that
a profile is visible to anyone and private means that it is Friends-only.

boyd (2007) defines a networked public as a set of developments, which are cultural, social and technological, that have been important to the engagement with network media, in particular, digital network media. To explore this deeper, a networked public is mediated; the interactions between the members of the public are mediated by the network itself. boyd (2007) goes on to identify the differences between mediated and unmediated publics, with an unmediated public being defined by boundaries and audiences that are structurally defined. A mediated public has the characteristics of “persistence, replicability, and invisible audiences” (boyd, 2007). boyd (2007) goes on from here to add that networked publics add ‘searchability’ to these characteristics, as well as amplifying the other three characteristics.

It is obvious that these four characteristics can be applied to an SNS, for example, Facebook:

Persistence refers to the recording of speech. Writing on eachother’s walls or commenting on pictures is an example of persistence within Facebook

Searchability is a fairly obvious one, we can search and find the ‘digital body’ of another online, whereas we cannot simply find the physical body of a person

Replicability refers to the difficulty in distinguishing between the original and a copy. Perhaps in this case a site like Twitter may be a more appropriate example, as often updates can be copied from person to person without knowing who the first to post it was.

Invisible audiences – it is practically impossible to detect who may come across or view our profiles on a SNS. Whilst some applications on Facebook claim to do this, they simply gather information from wall posts etc to make up information which seems to be true.

I think that the theory of networked publics is one that should be taken into consideration when thinking about SNS, as it can help to shed light on the public aspect of them.