ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on research about Facebook and the role it plays in the lives of a group of hairdressers living in a city in the north of England. The research has an ethnographic texture, where I, the researcher, shared in the young women’s Facebook spaces and took part in their conversations. They washed, cut and dyed my hair; they had lunch with me and we talked about Facebook. These women, my ‘Facebook Friends’, were aged between 17 and 19 and were taking an advanced hairdressing course at a local college. They were neither confident about nor interested in academic reading or writing; their preoccupations were fashion and beauty and trying to acquire financial independence at a time when jobs were scarce and the cost of living high. They invested substantial amounts of time reading and writing within Facebook using their phones—which they carried with them all the time—like the young people Williams describes in Chapter 9. None of them owned a laptop or desktop computer and they used their mobiles with dexterity. These literacy practices were an essential part of my Friends’ social and working lives; Facebook was used to make social and work arrangements, to advertise their hairdressing skills, to find out information, to debrief after social events, to display aspects of the events in their lives. Sometimes Facebook interactions constituted social events in themselves (Davies, 2013). This latter was instantiated by such things as online word play or other games that might later be referred to in face-to-face interaction, then taking on the status of a key happening in the Friends’ lives. Thus Facebook sometimes mediated and sometimes constituted social acts, becoming, alongside text messaging, part of the fabric of everyday life. As the project was closing, all the women had also adopted Twitter and Instagram and later still some were using Snapchat alongside Facebook.
