Uk

   

Social network sites in an international context

Last week, I spent two days attending the Media at LSE - Fifth Anniversary Conference of the Media Studies program at the London School of Economics. The conference had five tracks packed into two days. One of these was titled “Media and New Media Literacies” and there were a number of talks and papers that are relevant to our research efforts. This post is going to go into some depth about the very first session, which was a fascinating set of talks coming from people outside of the United States researching social network sites. (But scroll down to the bottom to see a few other presentations I really enjoyed.)

The first of these talks about social network sites in an global context concerned the use of mobile phones and social network sites in Japan [1]. Toshie Takahashi, from Tokyo’s Rikkyo University, presented the results of two studies . The first were video interviews of Japanese youth on the streets of Tokyo. These interviews showed some of the passion that interviewees had for their mobile phones and how essential they felt they were to their day to day life. But most of the time in the talk and in the paper concerns the second study a comparison of Japanese young people’s take up of Japanese SNS Mixi with their use of MySpace. According to Takahashi, Mixi launched in Japan in 2004 and now has 15 million members. MySpace Japan launched only two years later, in 2006, and currently has 1.2 million users. Takahashi argued that the use of Mixi and MySpace reflected the tension in Japanese culture between the notion of Uchi and Soto. As she puts it in the paper, “Uchi (inside, us)...exists in the belonging of people to social groups linked by close interpersonal relationships.” This social intimacy is linked to strong social obligations. Soto corresponds to “outside, them” and is about an outward-facing presentation.

The details of her study are fascinating and I cannot cover many here (though the paper is online ). Takahashi shows how people’s use of their MySpace accounts and their Mixi accounts are quite different in how they connect (or opt not to) with their friends and how they present themselves. There seems to be a different emotional valence in their use of each site, strongly connected with this tension between Uchi and Soto. Mixi opens up opportunities to be members of multiple Uchis (previously not thought possible), but this comes with significant social obligations to others. Use of MySpace, on the other hand, corresponds with the notion of Soto and people sometimes refuse connections to people they already know and rather present a radically different image of themselves as they connect to outside-Japan popular culture.

Takahashi concludes that contrary to the way a Senior Vice President at Viacom International Japan argued that Mixi is about “us” while MySpace Japan is really about “me, me, me,” both are about “me” and “them.” But Mixi is about “me and them” in Japan and involves a process of “re-Japanisation” while MySpace is about “me and them” in the global world and involves a romanticized process of self-creation and “de-Japanisation.”

Following Takahshi, Fiona Lennox of the UK’s Office of Communication, or Ofcom [2], presented a synthesis of various studies the organization conducted which social networking data was gathered:

One of the more interesting things about the studies, however, is the fact that they have data from both kids and adults and find that there are similarities as well as differences. Both groups primarily use these sites as their communication hubs. Issues of safety and security were not major concerns. Finally, there was a gap between what parents knew about what their kids were up to when they went online.

Another aspect of the studies I found interesting had to do with the way Ofcom created profiles of social network site users, dividing them into “alpha socializers,” “attention seekers,” “followers,” “faithfuls,” and “functional users.” I had trouble understanding the differences at times (and was surprised to hear that “Alpha Socializers” were more male than female in the UK...does this term mean what I assumed it to mean? Perhaps not!).  I also wondered how these user-types may contrast with the way that those of us associated with the Digital Youth research here in the United States tried to purposely move away from grouping people in this way and rather groups practices into various categories. I think one of the things we’ll have to consider going forward are the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.

The final talk of the session was a presentation by Naeema Farooqi of Dar Al-Hekma College in Saudi Arabia of her ongoing research on Facebook practices in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. She and colleagues gathered the results of questionnaires of college students at their respective institutions and followed some of them up with more in-depth interviews. She also mentioned that a number of Pakistani youth are on Orkut, an older social network site. Unfortunately, Farooqi’s paper is not yet online and my notes on the talk are unintelligible. I would love to hear more from her (and am making an attempt to do so). Despite my lack of details here, I still felt that pointing people towards her work and research would be a great starting point for building connections and the possibilities of comparative work.

I just wanted to conclude this review of these three talks with one meta-comment. Had I not been an attendee at the conference, I don’t know if I ever would have heard of the work of Takashi and Farooqi. More importantly I don’t think I would have gone looking under “media literacy” to find them, though I understand why they were there if one thinks of any literacies as highly contextual, embedded in practices that aren’t easy to abstract from their socio-cultural contexts. I think it shows how tricky it can be to connect researchers who are interested in common phenomena, but are in different fields and disciplines. I wonder if moving between global fields or disciplines is trickier than moving between global regions?

More from the conference

A few other things to check out from the conference:

Finally, you may want to see the final conference program , abstracts , and full papers, all on the conference website.

[1] Actually, the first talk was YouTube, Digital Literacy, and the Growth of Knowledge by John Hartley.  It was more of a theoretical piece on the nature of certain kinds of storytelling and the structuring of this storytelling that go on on YouTube. I am not going to give a recap here though the paper is online and is worth a read for those interested in the development of sites that open up opportunities for media sharing and distribution. Also, the paper mentions a pre-YouTube action research project from Hartley’s research group at the Queensland University of Technology (in Australia) called the Youth Internet Radio Network that is an interesting bit of history.

[2] According the their website, Ofcom is the “the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries, with responsibilities across television, radio, telecommunications and wireless communications services.” Ofcom was established by the Communications Act of 2003 and has been charged with the promotion of media literacy in the UK, where media literacy is defined by as “the ability to access, understand and create communications in a variety of contexts.” See their publications and research page for reports.