Social Networking

Introduction

Social-networking systems are a particularly collaborative way to construct identity. Facebook, a popular online social-networking system used by millions of adolescents and university-aged men and women, has received recent attention by researchers of online impression management (Glaser, 45). This is a particularly exciting research area because it allows collaborative identity construction. Once a user puts up an online profile, others can contribute to it. For the most part, these contributions are favorable; however, friends have also been known to post discrediting or defamatory messages on users' Facebook websites (Else, 23). In a study conducted by (Davis, 37), the researcher found that “complimentary, pro-social statements by friends about profile owners improved the profile owner's social and task attractiveness, as well as the target's credibility”.

Social networking Web sites have become more popular in recent years, especially among the hard-to-reach group of younger voters. Online communities such as MySpace and Facebook are most popular among high school and college students. MySpace, for example, had more than 61 million registered users with a primary age demographic of 16-34 at the end of 2006. Both MySpace and Facebook have a faithful group of daily visitors.

While much of the online communication on these social networks can be described as nonpolitical in nature with a heavy focus on entertainment uses, Facebook, for instance, includes groups formed around a specific political issue (Cockrell, 12). Also, individual profiles contain political affiliation, which is already being used to send e-mails with political information and calls for action.

Privacy Concerns

Along with the rise in popularity of social networking websites among teens have been concerns about user exposure to predators. The darker side of social networking is in part due to the open nature of most of the sites, where mobility and access are essential to producing greater exposure as well as ...