I will be presenting a paper tomorrow for the UOM 2010 Research Week in Lecture Theatre 2.
The paper’s title is ‘Young Adults & Social Networking Sites in Mauritius’. Deepa Rathacharen, who did her dissertation under my supervision last year, is the co-author.
Here’s a copy of the paper.
Young Adults & Social Networking Sites
Posted by commstudies on February 18, 2010 in communication, General, New Media, web 2.0
Tags: facebook, Hi5, social networks, uom research week
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Adel
February 18, 2010 at 11:18 am
Very interesting work. You provided some very useful data. For e.g never thought women spend lots of time changing their page layout etc. If i knew that i would have uploaded more girly theme onto our site
Another point i’ve noticed in the report is the percentage of people using network sites to send private messaging to friends. Since you can now build network sites with the buddypress plugin for stand alone wordpress, i wonder if there will be more niche mauritian social network sites popping up?
commstudies
February 19, 2010 at 3:00 am
Thanks Adel. About the girly theme, the paper suggests that many women like tweaking their pages to look beautiful, thus replicating the dominant behaviour regarding their physical appearance. It does not mean they like seeing girly themes elsewhere… It would thus be interesting to study the reception side because I suspect that does not necessarily mean they like girly themes on the sites they visit (just like they don’t generally like to see prettier dresses on the other women at a party)… And well, you might put off the male visitors for your site! Also, the observation was valid for Hi5 and less for Facebook which limits the possibility of tweaking the look of profile pages (not a bad thing according to me as I personally cannot stand girly themes:-)
As for the second part of the comment, anything is possible and there are all sorts of experimentations though it looks like Facebook is rallying many people and allowing multiple levels of engagement including private ones unless some other SNS crops up and gains even more popularity.