Enabling through Self-imaging

An observer of everyday communication among young people will quickly gain the impression that the use of social networking sites (SNS) has become an integral part of contemporary youth culture. In the summer of 2012, the platform Facebook alone had almost one billion users worldwide. ¹ According to a study conducted in Switzerland (the area in which the following thoughts most obviously apply), more than eighty percent of resident young people are registered with at least one SNS. ² For the majority of players, the industry leader Facebook is the SNS of choice, followed in second place by Netlog, a platform on which the communication options differ from those offered by Facebook. ³ While communication on Facebook takes place primarily via text messages, on Netlog visual communication and interaction take centre stage. Already on the home page for any given profile, one will find images and video clips linked in a prominent position, and in addition each page can be individually designed in terms of graphics and typography. The core of each Netlog profile, however, is formed by the category “images”. This is where participants collect together photographs, collages or graphic representations with which they present themselves to the Internet community. Visual media (primarily images) play a dual function in this context: they are both means and objects of communication. It is important that the Internet images represent the “right” codes, depending on the preferences within the peer group, but also that the images themselves are “correctly” designed and coded.