Conclusion

          Based on the data collected, I can both support and refute various aspects of my hypothesis and draw several larger conclusions.  First, that the first claim of my hypothesis (“Student organizations will use Facebook Pages for more professional and administrative business such as marketing and gathering a following or fan-base rather than using these sites to strengthen the relationships between members.”) was supported by the data.  I have found that a majority of the student organizations on the UCLA campus have Facebook pages and they are primarily being used for administrative, or professional, means.  Secondly, that I can both support and refute different aspects of the second claim in my hypothesis (“Students will feel hostility toward their organization for having them use their own individual sites as a platform for the marketing or professional business of their organization, and that students will feel the need to sensor their personal information because it is linked to the larger, professional organization.”).  I found that students are often strongly urged or required to modify their personal Facebook Pages for the benefit of their organizations, but that students often like to make these modifications, so this part of my hypothesis was unsupported.  I also found, however, that students did not feel they could post things freely on their personal Facebook Pages when they were linked to their student organizations, so this element of my hypothesis was supported.  Finally, I found that the third claim in my hypothesis (“Students will like their organizations less because their personal websites are used for the professional advancement of their organization.”) was unsupported.  I found that overall, regardless of the requirements or restrictions that developed as a result of the student organizations’ professional uses of their students’ Facebook Pages, all of these students still liked their organization to some extent, and a majority of them loved their organization. 

            These findings, and this assessment of my hypothesis, allow us to draw some larger claims about the uses and effects of social networking sites as a whole.  From the analysis of my data in terms of my hypothesis I found that an overwhelming number of student organizations had Facebook Pages and that their primary use was administrative and professional business.  Because these student organizations were large and influential organizations on a prominent University of California campus, and were representative of organizations, companies, and corporations in the world at large, and because Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites (and even websites) available today that represented social networking sites at large, we can generalize our findings to speculate that as a whole, social networking sites may be used more frequent for professional means regardless of their previous distinction as a “personal” space.  Based on the same reasoning, we may also say that the users of these websites may feel more restricted in what they can post due to their link to the professional organizations online (just as the respondents did in this sample).  Although we cannot say that these uses upset the users, or that they change the way these users view the corresponding companies with certainty, because these aspects of my hypothesis were not supported in the study, it is important to note that the potential lurking variable of school spirit, and the non-respondents who may not participate in these organizations because of these uses, should also be taken into consideration and further investigation should be done before any substantial conclusion can be drawn.  In all, my study of 112 typical, college-age students, of both sexes, from the University of California Los Angeles, in on-campus organizations is a representative study that can be used to draw the conclusions above, and although we can loosely generalize these findings to say something about the uses and effects of social networking sites on society as a whole, before we can generalize these findings with any true certainty, we would need a larger and more representative sample that moved beyond the scope of a University campus to avoid the lurking and confounding variables addressed above.

            Previous studies in the areas of professional uses of personal space, and on social networking websites, have provided us with a great deal of information about these two phenomena on individual levels.  From the study of Endersby (2002) and those by Makse and Sokhey (2010) we learned that personal space has often been utilized for professional, or specifically political, means, though these researchers found that these were all voluntary acts by individuals who were attempting to identify with a particular group.  From the plethora of studies in regards to social networking sites, including those by Peluchette and Karl (2008), Ellison, Lampe and Steinfield (2008), Raynes-Goldie and Walker (2008), Rosenblum (2007), and Calvert, Pempek and Yermolayeva (2009) we see that these sites are often looked at in terms of their uses and effects from a more psychological standpoint for the individual.  In this study, we have combined these two core ideas to examine what happens when social networking websites are the personal space, when the professional uses are required and not voluntary, and what effect this can have on the organization as well as the individual.  This is a developing area of the internet and a developing area of research, but by addressing these issues we can gain some insight as to not only how social networking sights are being used, but how this may affect the organizations and corporations using these personal spaces, and the general trend the internet may be following as a whole. 

            With this in mind, we can see that although no complete conclusions can be drawn in regards to social networking sites, the internet and society as a whole from this study, the data does provide us with a starting point to speculate.  We saw that student organizations were using Facebook Pages for primarily administrative, or professional means, and this may mean that social networking site in general are doing the same.  Due to the prominence of these sites to the Internet at large, it could even be speculated that the Internet may be shifting away from the personal uses and moving back to its more professional roots as a whole.  We also saw that students were strongly urged or required to use their Facebook Pages for the benefit of their organizations, and felt restricted by being linked to their organizations online.  If the same can be said for society and social networking sites as a whole, large organizations and corporations run the risk of jeopardizing their relationships with their members or consumers and the consequences may be detrimental to their productivity and success in the future.  Though we found in this study that the majority of students like to modify their pages and still liked their organizations regardless of the requirements and restrictions, it is uncertain whether this finding holds true for society at large because the variables of school spirit and pride, and the non-respondents who may be uninvolved because of these professional uses have not been examined at length.  What this study shows us, is that this application of the study of the professional use of personal space in online communities, namely social networking sites, is a new area of interest and there is a lot that remains to be explored, but the potential consequences of these professional uses and the potential knowledge about the trend of the internet as a whole that could be uncovered, make this not only a unique, but a vitally important field to explore in the near future.  By beginning to investigate this phenomenon today, and finding that Facebook, and more generally social networking sites, are being used for more professional means, I suspect these sites and the internet as a whole are moving back to their professional roots, and that although we cannot say for certain that these professional uses of personal space will not upset the users involved or change their relationships with the organizations in question (as we found in this study) we do know that users feel restricted in their personal expression and there are plenty or areas left to explore before we can say for certain whether the consequences of this development will be positive or negative.