Social
networking websites have been studied numerous ways from various fields, yet very
little academic research has been done on the professional uses of this
distinctly personal online space. By surveying
and interviewing various students from the University of California Los Angeles
campus, I examined this issue on a smaller scale to determine how on-campus organizations
were using social networking sites, namely Facebook, and the effect this had on
the organizations’ users and their relationship with their organizations. I found that Facebook was being utilized for
more professional than personal means and that students felt restricted in their
personal Pages, but that they often enjoyed these professional uses and their
opinion of their organizations did not decline.
Taking these findings into consideration, I was able to speculate about
the role and consequences of this phenomenon in society at large and what this
could say about the future of the Internet as a whole.
