Metadata
Title
Profiles as Conversation: Networked Identity Performance on Friendster
Category
general
UUID
0c97d4aa90f74425b332c73f0350332c
Source URL
https://idl.uw.edu/papers/friendster-profiles
Parent URL
https://idl.uw.edu/papers
Crawl Time
2026-03-11T03:09:43+00:00
Rendered Raw Markdown

Profiles as Conversation: Networked Identity Performance on Friendster

Source: https://idl.uw.edu/papers/friendster-profiles Parent: https://idl.uw.edu/papers

danah boyd, Jeffrey Heer. Proc. Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS), 2006

danah boyd, Jeffrey Heer

Proc. Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS), 2006

Materials

PDF

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.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{2006-friendster-profiles,
  title = {Profiles as Conversation: Networked Identity Performance on Friendster},
  author = {boyd, danah AND Heer, Jeffrey},
  booktitle = {Proc. Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS)},
  year = {2006},
  url = {https://idl.uw.edu/papers/friendster-profiles},
  doi = {10.1109/HICSS.2006.394}
}

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