Becoming and Belonging: Performativity, Subjectivity and the Cultural Purposes of Social Networking

A problem with the ways that social networking sites have been investigated and discussed by researchers, journalists, and public commentators is that much of the time, just one out of a broad range of purposes, uses, tools, functions, or gratifications of social networking is articulated as the primary purpose of sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Twitter, and YouTube. These include seeing social networking as a site for a number of different, categorizable purposes: personal experiences among friends, whether known or strangers (Ellison et al. 2007, 1143); articulation of identity-based interests through the construction of taste statements (Liu 2008, 253); relationship maintenance and new introductions (friending) (Hoadley et al. 2010, 52; Tong et al. 2008, 531); representation of preexisting and salient aspects of users' identities for others to view, interpret, and engage with (boyd 2007, 11; Buffardi and Campbell 2008); and youth engagement and communication outside of geographic constraints and parental surveillance (boyd 2007, 18). These are all ostensible reasons for the use of social networking-conscious, self-aware purposes articulated by different users in different combinations. When it comes to the relationship between the multiplicity of uses and identity, there is a common tendency in both scholarship and popular discourse to assume that the identities of users are fixed, static, and merely represented or expressed through online activities. An alternative view is to consider the ways in which social networking sites operate as a space for the continued, ongoing construction of subjectivity-neither a site for identity play nor for static representation of the self, but as an ongoing reflexive performance and articulation of selfhood that utilizes the full range of tools made available through common social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.