Although numerous scholars have focused on social media users performing identity and networking with others, few examine the ways in which the architectures of these sites provide the guiding light for users. Like all environments and their structures, social networking sites grant their users certain affordances, and these resources are invariably couched in political and economic powers. This paper argues that while analog media privilege narrative, digital media privilege databases. Thus it is salient to recognize social media affordances and their implications for how users view others, themselves, and reality.
As Winner discusses in 1980, artifacts indeed have politics—human-made structures hold entrenched values. Because digital spaces are human-made structures, they too are inextricably bound to the assumptions and expectations of their creators. Websites are essentially databases that employ interfaces with which users can interact. Interface designers select database content for users and in what manner they will experience it. With the introduction of Web 2.0 and sites that encourage user-created content, an aspect of user experience is filling sites’ databases. In fact, social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter provide simple templates and rely on users to populate databases. Through this process, an illusion of narrative is formed. However, because social media sites are digital, they still privilege databases, even if the self-presentation process simulates that of narrative-privileging media.
Employing Facebook as a case study, I explore how digital affordances drive user experience. The quantifiable properties of database-driven media hold many implications for identification. Viewing Facebook as a filter or mediator, I conduct a structural discourse analysis, breaking the site into seven natural subsets—Sign Up, About Page, Photographs, Timeline, Friends, Likes, and Cookies. I find that Facebook offers finite identification spaces often tied to heteronormative identities in an effort to craft a searchable, and profitable, database.
About the presenterAngela M. Cirucci
Angela received her PhD from the School of Media and Communication at Temple University and is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Rowan University. Angela is a digital media scholar focusing on the symbolic meaning of programming languages, the intersection of institutional practice and user knowledge, and user experience. Often focusing on identity, she has a passion for studying how digital spaces impact the lives of marginalized communities.