Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
200000
180000
160000
140000
120000
100000
80000
60000
40000
20000
0
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2012
Fig. 6.7 Growth in World's Blogosphere, 2003-2011 (millions). Source. redrawn from Technorati
2007 and SMI
2012
often trotted out for public display and consumption (Debatin et al.
2009
). In
shifting the role of users from simple broadcasting of information to engagement
with others, social networks facilitate a marketing of the self, as if it were a brand
name, in which the public presentation of self is carefully micromanaged.
Goffman's (
1959
) front stage, as it were, has gone virtual. Livingstone and Brake
(
2010
, p. 76) argue that social networking satisfies ''a desire to construct a valued
representation of oneself which affirms and is affirmed by one's peers.'' However,
there are costs to this strategy: for example, by allowing the posting of photos,
including when poster is engaged in unsavory or illegal behavior, social networks
may create problems later when prospective employers view such material as part
of their assessment of job candidates (Hill
2011
; Waters
2011
). Increasingly, users
have become self-conscious of this phenomenon: indeed, an example of auto-
panopticonic behavior can be found when college students on spring break min-
imize their normal rowdiness for fear that photos or videos of them posted on-line
may come back to haunt them later (Alvarez
2012
).
The public, networked self is also evident in the blogosphere, which for many
people has emerged as an important dimension of social networking (Bruns
2008
).
In 2011, the internet hosted more than 173 million blogs (Fig.
6.7
), with an
additional 30,000 added every day. Typically blogs are interwoven with other
blogs, forming complicated spatialities of hyperlinks that may be both local and
global in scope and scale (Lin
2007
). Free and uncensored, some blogs operate as
on-line personal diaries and are aimed a variety of audiences ranging from family
members to the public at large, sometimes with tags that organize posts along the
lines of a given theme, and often with ''comment'' features that allow readers to
post feedback. Others exist simply as mills for the dissemination of rumors and
gossip, often with RSS (''really simple syndication'') feeds that notify readers
of blog updates. The majority of bloggers are women, and half are under age 35
(SMI
2012
). This sort of self-publishing demonstrates the public performance of
