Emotionality, identity and social presence in the use of Facebook profiles with age set examples

Abstract

This paper (i) sets out a growing problem in digital sociology concerning the inability of current theoretical frameworks to enable us to decide about whether Web technologies create a context for radical social change; (ii) a corpus of the literature on Social Network Sites (SNSs) is critically reviewed with a view to evaluating the evidence that suggests links can be made between human emotionality and identity experience, key socio-demographic profiling and Facebook use; (iii) we examine two frameworks (Goffman’s impression management and Foucault’s self-surveillance) and apply them to the examination of data from two Facebook projects linking age sets to Facebook usage. The first project, based on an online survey (n=255) shows significant relationships between envy, age and aspects of Facebook use. The second project based on qualitative interview and Facebook user diaries of two generational age sets strongly indicates age differences in the meanings attached to Facebook profiles and usage.

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