draft

A set of notes to define and refine questions with which to approach Facebook.

People use Facebook to connect with others, to be seen, and to be seen in a particular light. They construct profiles using a set of template-categories, then engage in a set of rhetorical acts of connection: browsing, poking, adding messages to walls, collecting and posting images, adding people to friends, joining groups, creating groups... Participants use the rhetorical affordances of Facebook to create profiles that attract not just passing attention but links and responses on line, and meetings and events off-line.

This is all done, as well, in a public space. In this public space, as in all public spaces, we have participants: others who are engage in the same activities, even the recipient of the activities. But we also have observers: Others not directly engaged in the activities can observe the exchange.Facebook users employ techniques and strategies of persuasion to meet their ends. Some moves might go to entertain our friends, while at the same time performing for others who don't know us.

Add it up and we can see Facebook as a space for public rhetoric - not a place for discussion and debate, but for social interaction, social networking, trading links and content, not in depth analysis. Facebook, like any other public medium, engages persuasion, even as Stoner and Perkins define it: seeking to affect the beliefs, values, or actions of others.

General Qs to frame our study

Facebook demands that we consider the dynamic of presentation. That is, people go on Facebook to do something social. Perhaps it is to become popular, or to engage in a set of social exchanges, but the purposes can be closer than that. We'll start with some discussion to unpack these questions:

Rhetorical Situation

Consider the exigencies

What persuades students to

• join Facebook in the first place,
• start a Facebook page,
• refine and update their page,
• continue to engage in exchange?
• What exegencies arise once the page is up? How are they created? How are they met?

Consider audiences

• Who are the audiences for the Facebook exchange?

Consider constraints

• How about external social constraints such as coaches banning players from Facebook, or the knowledge that parents or faculty might be looking in? What are these constraints and how do users negotiate them and draw on them?

Some questions that rhetorical analysis might address

• How do participants persuade each other to do what on Facebook?

That is, What rhetorical purposes and ends do users seem to engage on Facebook? Create popularity? Attract others? Others ends? Make a list. Once we ID some purposes, we can to look at how? Create popularity how? Or perhaps they simply want to share. Share what and how - especially knowing that the rest of the area can see their performances. Create authenticity, how?

• How do individuals use Facebook affordances to create an ethos?
• What else do they do with those affordances?

• What other messages - perhaps unintentional messages - are created? Facebook has intentional stuff, but it's performative, too: an enactment for a particular audience that others can view and interpret. (consider Burke).

• To what extent - and how - are Facebook profiles (necessarily?) limited in dimension? Which dimensions of ethos do profiles afford, and which constrain?

• How do users tend to gage popularity? Number of friends? Number of wall entries? Diverseness of music tastes?
• How do Facebook users create popularity? What do they do to persuade others to pay active attention to them: add them to their friends, post on their wall, etc.