Brokering friends: Exploring social capital and online privacy of Latin American immigrants on Facebook

摘要

In the networked society, migrations happen simultaneously offline and online. This thesis explores how privacy, our “portable territory of the self” (Fairfield, 2005), migrates physically and virtually, and describes the negotiations that take place when different notions of privacy converge on Facebook. By observing how Latin Americans aged 25 to 34 living in Montreal use Facebook to create social capital and how privacy implications impact on the creation of social capital on Facebook, this thesis incorporates cultural, institutional, and other contextual (offline) factors into the analysis of online privacy. Finally, this thesis proposes the concepts of instrumental privacy and expressive privacy to explain how goals, strategies, and actions for successful socialization are implemented on Facebook to create social capital.