There, I hope the title got your attention. It was prompted by a series of discussions I had, both in real life and with some of my 'virtual friends' on Facebook, about what people do on different types of social networking sites and why.
The group for my book (doh! - must get out of publicity mode) that I set up on Facebook seemed to be rather odd to me. It started with the idea of a place for "authors to meet their public", the membership, grew and grew, but nothing seemed to happen. Intrigued by the way the group was growing, one of my research students tried asking people how they got to the group - with hardly any response.
Then, I started thinking about Facebook and LinkedIn. There is a lot of cross over between my membership of LinkedIn and Facebook, but my group of 'friends' on Facebook are not the same as my 'contact network' on LinkedIn. The two platforms have a different look and feel, they seem to exist for subtly different purposes and, in comparison to Emerge, Yahoo Groups or even the good old-fashioned UseNet mailing groups, seem to be fairly static and lifeless.
So why do so many people sign up to these groups? One answer was provided by somebody called Sue Wolff who replied to a question (What is the point of this group?) I posted to the group for the book; she explained, "people join groups in Facebook ... to re-territorialize our representations - providing ourselves with a sense that we exist due to our expressed and signed affiliations".
It rang a bell with me. Previously I had used the, perhaps less savoury, metaphor of 'scent marking' to describe this sort of thing. People come; make their mark and leave, occasionally returning to re-stake their claim to a digital identity through their association with a particular group or a set of ideas. So, viewed in this way, sites like Facebook and LinkedIn become what Sue described as "aggregation lists" rather than the sites for active participation.
Do others have a view on this? Can sites be 'designed' to act as territorial marker, a convenient rock or tree trunk for us to spray our digital ... no, perhaps I should not go there 
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