Natalie Pennington

Impression management and formation on Facebook: A lens model approach

To extend research on online impression formation and warranting theory, the present investigation reports a Brunswick lens model analysis of Facebook profiles. Facebook users’ (n = 100) personality (i.e. extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness) was self-reported. Facebook users’ profiles were then content analyzed for the presence and rate of 53 cues. Observers (n = 35), who were strangers to profile owners, estimated profile owner personality. Results indicate that observers could accurately estimate profile owners’ extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. For all personality traits except neuroticism, unique profile cues were diagnostic warrants of personality (i.e. indicative of profile owner personality and used to estimate personality by strangers). The results are discussed in relation to warranting theory, impression formation, and lens model research.

You Don't De-Friend the Dead: An Analysis of Grief Communication by College Students Through Facebook Profiles

This research examined how various members of a social network interact with the Facebook (FB) profile page of a friend who has died. From 43 in-depth qualitative interviews, FB friends of deceased FB users maintained their FB connection with the deceased. Most participants who visited the profile found it helpful to look at pictures; a few wrote messages to the deceased as a coping mechanism. In some instances, a spouse or parent controlled the profile, which respondents universally viewed as having a negative effect on their ability to cope with their loss.

Social Media and Democracy: Innovations in Participatory Politics:

The penultimate chapter focuses on slapstick comedies set in amusement parks, more specifically the comedies from Coney Island. Many silent comedies from 1909 until 1918 used theme parks as a site for gags with their machinery and architecture as a perfect backdrop for physical comedy. Rabinovitz takes examples such as Jack Fat and Slim at Coney Island (1910), exploring the nature of what was inherently comedic about these backdrops: ‘The visceral engagement and fascination in physical spectacle for which amusement parks offered a privileged subject served a historically specific purpose of an earlier era when a conjoined celebration of speed, industrial power, and bodily kinetics meant kindling a national participation in technological modernity’ (p. 161). This chapter is the highlight for the examination of cinema and is the best example of the marriage of amusement parks and film. The book concludes by discussing the opening of Disneyland in 1955 where this became a cultural event in itself, being promoted with a special two-hour live broadcast entitled Dateline Disneyland, which was viewed by 90 million people. This further highlights the theme of modernity not only in how audiences consume culture but also in the impact television had in 1950s America. Rabinovitz goes into considerable detail about the dependence of promotion through television which Disney required: ‘As is well known, Disneyland depended on broadcast television not only for promotion but also for financing its construction’ (p. 165). This was a major development in modern advertising, and Rabinovitz suggests that it redefined the relationships between amusement parks and movies. What follows is an interesting if brief discussion on the role of adults and their experiences at Disneyland and how Disney himself was more interested in children as consumers. Finally, this book offers great insight into what has become a major recreational activity and, though Rabinovitz is slightly more focused on the development of amusement parks, there is a significant argument made for the impact both parks and movies had on American modernity.

Facebook Democracy: The Architecture of Disclosure and the Threat to Public Life

technology for social change. It is time to give serious intellectual attention to the generation and analysis of such evidence. Hand’s book is an important call for this, not least because of his recognition of the wide-ranging significance of personal photography in contemporary everyday culture. The relations between ‘old’ and ‘new’ photographic technologies point to situations and responses to situations that remain fluid and ‘on the move’, involving the mutual interaction of forces of change and structures of continuity. Generally, Hand tells the story of this well. He does so in part because he is cautious not simply to play up what is novel, or simply to play down what is being inherited and taken forward. The current scenario may be one of contradictory tendencies, with for example mnemonic photographic practices becoming more individualized and privatized, and the images produced becoming more widely distributed, publicly accessible and collectively defined, but the analytical challenge in all of this is to grasp together these tendencies and show them as part of the same complex picture. Hand proves to be a reliable guide in taking us through what remains a rather bewildering landscape, one which we need continuously to monitor, attending as much to the experience and practice of those involved in making and engaging with personal photography as to the technologies and software facilities they deploy in doing so.