Reticular Embeddedness, Interstitial Form: The Biography of User Engagement with Their Social Networking Sites
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Yu, Chen-Yi
Abstract
“How do people use SNSs?” is a question whose answers can be as simple as rational behaviors. The dissertation places this question in an interactive context between users and SNSs, making it evolve from one single question to a process in which micro scenes of daily life and macro cultural contexts penetrate each other. The goal of this study is to explore how SNSs shape our rhythm of daily life, as well as what a social culture expects and imagines about the value of SNSs, and to create a life-embedded narrative of mutual penetration between users and SNSs. To answer the above question, time was chosen purposefully as a factor that intermediates the interaction between users and SNSs. The framework of three different scales including large-scale time, life time, and everyday time, was constructed to investigate how social culture, use careers and micro-interaction influence our daily SNSs usage. Multiple methods were conducted for different scales of time. For example, news content analysis was adopted to study large-scale time, while depth interview for life time. For everyday time, the logs of SNSs usage on mobile phones and personal computers were collected to verify results of depth interview. On the level of large-scale time, SNSs related news from 1989 to 2015 were found to create a narrative framework in terms of its role, effect and relationship control. SNSs were implied with roles such as information, communication, personal media, and capitals, which means that, in additional to its actual and practical purpose, SNSs was expected to play multiple roles in different circumstances. Regarding the effect of SNSs, it was described as a double-edged sword, which provides safety but also leads to inevitable social surveillance and traps. These metaphors account for the do-want and don''t want effect of SNSs. Users were found to describe how they view SNSs carefully with narrative frameworks such as control, vigilance, and boundary, which reveal their awareness of good use and abuse of SNSs. This collection of news narratives not only shows the development history of SNSs but also influence how people recognize and use SNSs. On the scale of life time, users and SNSs were found to mutually embedded with each other. The meaning of embedment deviates from both rational action and demographic characteristics. Neither the material features of SNSs nor the personal demographic variables of users can independently work in the relationship between users and SNSs. Rather, the mechanism of domestication of SNSs are situational, cultural, and historical. Also, the processes of appropriation are involved with subjective interpretation and meaning endowment in a context. With the change of social contexts, domesticated SNSs could be de-domesticated or re-domesticated. On the everyday time scale, the characteristics of time including duration, temporal location, sequence, deadline, cycle, and rhythm were applied to investigate how SNSs were situated in the temporal structure of one’s daily life. The result shows that the duration of SNSs usage was influenced by the characteristics of SNSs, users’ appropriation, and social norms in specific social circumstances. The uses of SNSs are not randomly allocated at one’s daily life but deeply influenced by various social relations, cultural expectation, technology support, and rituals of life. When encountering a due date in one’s life, the uses of SNSs are often tuned to a recognized “appropriate” mode. Existing temporal structure and life cycle still have an effect on social media usage and accordingly, following the change of contexts, the rhythm with both routine and exception is generated. To sum up, the three mutual penetrating scales of time experiences reveal that SNSs enter people’s daily life in reticular rhythms and fill in every single slot in a fragmental, intermittent, short, and interstitial form of usage. Based on the results, the dissertation concludes its theoretical significance and contribution in three aspects. First, the SNSs usage is discussed, not on the basis of a snapshot-like observation, but in specific contexts with different temporal scales, which suggests that the relationship between users and SNSs is not a derivative construction of variables, but an embedded biography of lived experiences which develop in situational contexts. Second, the empirical study in the dissertation provides a more contrete way of thinking with regard to the human-technology relationship, which is not limited to an absolute subject-object relation, but a multilevel networked relationship. Last, among the multiple research methods applied in the study, lifelogging method particularly is found to expand the hermeneutics, which benefits researchers in discussing the relationship between roles of tools and scientific knowledge.
Subjects
SNSs
temporality
domestication
appropriation
reticular embeddedness
interstitial form
Type
thesis
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