ABSTRACT
This paper presents research into how four female trainee hairdressers use Facebook. The participants are friends, attending college in the north of England. In this work I was interested in participants' presentations of self as presented through their Facebook activities. This work draws on New Literacy Studies to consider the written texts and photographic representations in Facebook profiles and albums; it also draws on Paechter's concept of communities of gendered practice and combines these theories to examine ways in which the participants' Facebook literacy practices could be considered as gendered – and what this might mean. Through regular online textual representations of their lives, the trainees not only continually reviewed their own lives on a moment-by-moment basis, but kept surveillance of the lives of their online friends. In this process they participated in the maintenance of gendered communities of literacy practice. The data comprise notes and transcriptions of group interviews about the young women's uses of Facebook and from Facebook data itself – the girls' Facebook walls and selected photographs.
