CHRISTIAN FUCHS - ICT&S - Universität Salzburg

Christian Fuchs: Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance Society7.7. Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Networking SitesWe asked the respondents what they think the greatest advantages and disadvantages,i.e. opportunities and risks, of social networking sites were with the help of two openquestions. We received 557 qualitative answer texts to the question that addressedadvantages and 542 texts relating to disadvantages. The open questions were askedmore at the beginning of the questionnaire before the topic of surveillance wasintroduced in order to make sure that the respondents were not influenced by this topicin listing advantages and disadvantages. We identified 18 categories for the advantagesand 16 categories for the disadvantages and analyzed the answers to the two openquestions by content analysis (Krippendorff 2004) so that each text was mapped withone or more categories. Our respondents tended to list more than one major advantageand disadvantage. Therefore each answer was mapped with more than one category inmost cases.Figure 38 presents the major advantages of social networking sites that our respondentsmentioned.Figure 38. Major perceived opportunities of social networking sites1: Maintaining existing contacts, friendships, family relations, etc2: Establishing new contacts with unknown people or with people whom one hardly knowsand can easier contact online3: Finding and renewing old contacts4: Communication in interest groups and hobby groups5: Communication and contacts in general (no further specification)6: International and global character of communication and contacts7: Sharing and accessing photos, music, videos8: Entertainment, fun, spare time, amusement89