Profiles as Conversation: Networked Identity Performance on Friendster
Abstract
Profiles have become a common mechanism for presenting one’s identity online. With the popularity of online social networking services such as Friendster.com, Profiles have been extended to include explicitly social information such as articulated "Friend" relationships and Testimonials. With such Profiles, users do not just depict themselves, but help shape the representation of others on the system. In this paper, we will discuss how the performance of social identity and relationships shifted the Profile from being a static representation of self to a communicative body in conversation with the other represented bodies. We draw on data gathered through ethnography and reaffirmed through data collection and visualization to analyze the communicative aspects of Profiles within the Friendster service. We focus on the role of Profiles in context creation and interpretation, negotiating unknown audiences, and initiating conversations. Additionally, we explore the shift from conversation to static representation, as active Profiles fossilize into recorded traces.
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Close members of one's inner circle sit alongside strangers under the same banner in an endlessly expanding horizontal network, thus compressing social relations and eliminating context.
“Close members of one's inner circle sit alongside strangers under the same banner in an endlessly expanding horizontal network, thus compressing social relations and eliminating context.”
From New Media, Networking and Phatic Culture (2008) · cites this paper as Boyd and Heer, 2006
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- Authors
- Boyd, D., & Heer, J.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Berkeley (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'06)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2006
- Pages
- 59c-59c
- ISSN
- 1530-1605 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2164514422
- Cited by
- 399
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 20 · 2019: 11 · 2018: 20 · 2017: 22 · 2016: 24 · 2015: 15 · 2014: 31 · 2013: 31 · 2012: 32
- FWCI
- 19.95
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › Media and Digital Communication
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Digital Communication and Language
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies
- Keywords
- online profiles, social identity, identity performance, Friendster, online social networking, conversation, friendship, testimonials, context construction, conversation initiation, digital traces, self-representation
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