Facebook Timelines: Understanding sustained social media use among young people

This project focuses on the sustained use of digital social media, specifically Facebook, exploring changes in disclosure practices over time. Dr Lincoln and I have sought to better understand the role of social media in mediating and archiving ‘growing up’ narratives, where key rites of passage are mediated and recorded by default over time. The digital traces that are generated through the sustained use of sites like Facebook come to serve as longitudinal records of people’s lives, and we are interested in how users – especially young people who have been using digital social media throughout their lives – make sense of these traces. The research method involves in-depth interviews with participants (20-29 years old) and ‘scrolling back’ through their social media histories (5+ years).