Social Network Sites (SNS) and Digital Culture

Abstract

This chapter aims at building an analytical framework that expands the current scholarship on Social Network Sites (SNS) to the domain of museums. SNS are web-based services that allow their users to create public or semi-public profiles and use these to create lists of other users with whom they share a connection, with the possibility to make their networks visible to themselves and also to make these networks visible at various degrees of public access (boyd & Ellison 2008, 211). These technologies also allow for communication between members of a network within various degrees of control and privacy. The emergence and growing popularity of SNS, with examples of general public services such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, niche versions such as those allowed by the Ning platform, and the current trend of including SNS capabilities in media sharing services such as YouTube and Flickr, has brought to museums new opportunities and challenges to engage in dialogue and connect with a variety of publics. The chapter discusses ongoing research into the role online activities play in the communications and branding strategies of museums, and how theory and technology might be applied to develop an analytical framework for a specific case, the Panama Viejo Museum. The main question that the chapter addresses is how to measure the degree the use of Social Network Sites and their impact in the online practices of museums, and proposes as response a framework for museum SNS analytics.