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What Is Facebook For? A problem with the ways that social networking sites have been investigated and discussed by researchers, journalists, and public commentators is that much of the time, just one out of a broad range of purposes, uses, tools, functions, or gratifications of social networking is articulated as the primary purpose of sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Twitter, and YouTube. These include seeing social networking as a site for a number of different, categorizable purposes: personal experiences among friends, whether known or strangers (Ellison et al. 2007, 1143); articulation of identity-based interests through the construction of taste statements (Liu 2008, 253); relationship maintenance and new introductions (friending) (Hoadley et al. 2010, 52; Tong et al. 2008, 531); representation of preexisting and salient aspects of users’ identities for others to view, interpret, and engage with (boyd 2007, 11; Buffardi and Campbell 2008); and youth engagement and communication outside of geographic constraints and parental surveillance (boyd 2007, 18). These are all ostensible reasons for the use of social networking—conscious, self-aware purposes articulated by different users in different combinations. When it comes to the relationship between the multiplicity of uses and identity, there is a common tendency in both scholarship and popular discourse to assume that the identities of users are fixed, static, and merely represented or expressed through online activities. An alternative view is to consider the ways in which social networking sites operate as a space for the continued, ongoing construction of subjectivity—neither a site for identity play nor for static representation of the self, but as an ongoing reflexive performance and articulation of selfhood that utilizes the full range of tools made available through common social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. 55 Becoming and Belonging Performativity, Subjectivity, and the Cultural Purposes of Social Networking k R o b C o v e r Judith Butler’s theories of identity performativity have enormous capacity to further our understanding of how people use the profile functions of social networking and why so many people invest such a great deal of time, energy, effort, and emotional investment in social networking maintenance, contact, and communication. Working from a poststructuralist antifoundationalist perspective that draws on Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida, Butler’s theory of performativity is based on the idea that identity and subjectivity is an ongoing process of becoming, rather than an ontological state of being, whereby becoming is a sequence of acts that retroactively constitute identity (Salih 2002, 46; Butler 1990). That is, the performance of a facet of identity in accord with discursively given knowledge establishes the necessary fiction of an actor behind the act, a doer behind the deed: the self or “I” is made up of a matrix of identity categories, experiences, and labels (Butler 1990, 40) that through repetition lend the illusion of an inner identity core (Butler 1993, 12). Where Butler’s theories provide an important perspective for the study of social networking and identity construction is in extending the very idea of performance from the bodily, the experiential, the affective into the field of online acts. In other words, online social networking behavior is as performative as “real life” acts, and just as equally implies a stabilized core inner self behind the profile. Importantly, this shifts our understanding of social networking from one in which identity is understood through ideas of representation of the “real” in the realm of the “digital.” Instead, it opens the possibility of thinking about social networking and identity in the context of being a matrix of acts of profile building, maintenance, friending, updating, tagging, album adding, and other networked communication , contiguous with the many everyday nonvoluntarist and nonconscious performances of selfhood. This is, in part, to respond to Helen Kennedy’s call for Internet identity research to move away from claims of online anonymous, multiple, and fragmented selves but also to look at the continuities between online and offline identity by engaging with cultural studies debates that call into question the self-evidence of subjectivity and the usefulness of concepts of identity (Kennedy 2006, 859–61; see also this volume, 25–41). Indeed, as we have shifted from the text-based online world of Web 1.0 to a more interactive matrix of online behaviors in Web 2.0, characterized by social networking, audio-visual representation, and everyday tools for creative expression, we can see that online applications are taken up for anything but anonymity. Instead they are part of a complex response to...

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