ABSTRACT
A social scientist, Adam N. Joinson, made a study of how people use Facebook and came up with a number of different ways that Facebook members use the site. This chapter investigates the uses of social networking site Facebook, and the gratifications users derive from those uses. Factor analysis identified seven unique uses and gratifications: social connection, shared identities, content, social investigation, social network surfing and status updating. The reason that Facebook is popular is because it provides so many services to people who belong to it. Photography has always intrigued writers, perhaps because it offers an alternative way of capturing reality from other image systems, such as painting, and from the written word. Smartphones and some digital cameras now come with means for sending images directly to Facebook or other social media, so photography has been transformed from being a private way to take and keep images and has become an extremely popular social form of messaging.
