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tractive to advertisers means that privacy of users
can be compromised in other ways. Wendlandt
(2007) notes that online advertising is the fastest
growing segment of the advertising industry, cur-
rently accounting for more than 25% of advertis-
ing growth per year, translating to more than five
times the recent average annual growth of other
types of media with about 6-7% spent on Internet
advertising globally. Recently, 13,000 Facebook
users signed a petition protesting against the
networking site's new advertising system which
alerts members of friends' purchases online. Some
Facebook members have even threatened to leave
due to the fact that the new system allowed their
friends to find out what they were planning to give
them for Christmas (Wendlandt, 2007). Preibusch
et al. (2007) point out that popular SNS sites, such
as MySpace.com, collect data for e-commerce
purposes. User profiles are important for data
mining in such websites. Data that accrues on the
web is not only used for communicating but also
for secondary purposes that may be covered in the
SNS's terms of use. Such data can be acquired
by marketing agencies for targeted marketing or
by law enforcement agencies and secret services,
etc (Preibusch et al, 2007).
and everyday engagements mean that visibility
and non-visibility of social and personal networks
will construct online identities as a vital part of
a data economy. The need to reveal and to limit
information flows and to enact a secure environ-
ment for users whilst enforcing users to comply
with data management protocols on such sites will
enact these as a contested space of new forms of
sociability and social deviance. The users' notion
of security, privacy and the human need for com-
munion will continue to temper the social networks
as complex and complicit risk communities.
ConClusion
The narcissistic streak in social networking sites
that is evident through the creation of self- pro-
files hinges on the disclosure of offline identities
where public spectacle and gaze repoliticize the
construction of self. The notion of self in so-
cial networking sites is both imagined through
self-description and crafted through textual and
multimedia environments but equally through its
articulation and display of contacts and its ability
to invite or deny communion with other users. In
this sense, the concept of self is anchored through
both individual agency and imagination as well
as other users' gaze and consumption of these
profiles. This explicit ethos of exposure, display,
and spectacle define the cultural ethos of social
networking sites. This phenomenon again ignites
debates about the issues of identity formation on
the Internet where identity can be created and
defined in multiple ways and is amenable to decep-
tion and inauthenticity. In the process, it highlights
the complex nature of the Internet environment
which can demand different cultural responses
from different online spaces and communities
of users. Self-exposure and narcissism gives a
platform for re-definition of offline identities and
new sociabilities which can in turn reconfigure
and redefine the notion of friendship and com-
munity in these spaces. SNS's also herald the
Future trends
With the increasing popularity of social network-
ing sites, the incorporation of various multimedia
formats and functions in these platforms, the
supplanting of actual offline networks through
social networks on the internet construct social
networking sites as viable spaces for the move-
ment of new forms of both social and financial
capital (i.e. advertising, e-commerce and data
mining). Here the act of connecting with larger
user communities present challenges and risks
for users, social software designers, commercial
organizations and government bodies. The increas-
ing appropriation of social networking sites into
our everyday lives (through mobile technologies)
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