Uncovering facebook photo tagging culture and practices among digital natives

AbstractAdoption of Social Networking Services (SNS) has gained immense popularity in developing countries like India where digital natives are actively engaging and communicating with these platforms. Understanding the interaction between technology systems and digital natives and proposing guidelines and recommendations for the development of better and good fit systems is highly valuable. Prior research examining users' motivations and actual usage from photo tagging systems is limited and predominately focused on Flickr and adult users while many aspects are completely missing. In order to understand in detail as why, how and with whom, digital natives tag digital photos on Facebook, a qualitative essay based exploratory study is organized with 67 participants in India. The study aims at understanding various gratifications, motivations, experiences and practices around Facebook photo tagging focusing on the technologically savvy Indian digital natives. Our results point out that Facebook photo tagging practices by digital natives substantially vary especially among the gender groups. Facebook photo tagging is popular among Indian boys and they are more willing to embrace and use the photo tagging activity. Meanwhile, the involvement of Indian girls is considerably limited as they tend to avoid Facebook photo tagging mainly due to privacy concerns as well as social norms and pressures.Keywords: Digital natives, Photo Tagging, Social networking services, Facebook, Human Factors, IndiaIntroductionOver the years, digital photography has become more viable and common mainly due to the availability of low-cost yet high end digital cameras, enhancement in the inbuilt mobile phone camera and a strong desire to share moments with others online. Online photo sharing services have gained immense popularity in recent years as they offer the users ease of sharing and other innovative opportunities for sharing their photos with other people. Digital photo sharing has been one of the integral part of most of the Social networking services (SNS), especially Facebook. Since the launch of photo sharing feature on Facebook in October 2005, it has been one of the most popular activity as billions of photos have been shared by its users (Facebook Newsroom, 2013). The integration of photo sharing within SNS has provided the users with unique opportunities such as, communicating, express likings and feelings, and tagging. Photo tagging feature on Facebook allows the users to tag their network friends in their digital photos. The reach and popularity of photo tagging feature can be accessed in a way that within a month of launching this feature, about 85% of the Facebook subscribers got tagged atleast once (Kirkpatrick, 2010). Furthermore, 100 million photos are tagged daily on Facebook (Pesce et al. 2012). Social networking sites (SNS) have gained significant popularity across all regions, age groups, and genders, especially youth. A survey of American youth by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 41% of 12-13 year olds and 61% of 14-17 year olds use social networking sites (Lenhart and Madden, 2007). Similarly, another recent study by the same institute observed that adolescents are highly engaged with SNS, as 93% of the American teenagers have a Facebook account (Lenhart et al. 2010). Various activities revolving around digital photos on SNS including sharing, commenting, liking, and tagging has been embraced by teenagers, as every nine out of ten teenagers post their photos on SNS, making it the most popular SNS based activity (Madden et al. 2013). Furthermore, on Facebook which is regarded as one of the most popular and frequently accessed SNS, beside posting on walls, and reading content, engaging with digital photos including photo sharing and tagging has been one of the popular pastime especially among the adolescents (Bruneel et al. 2013).Even though, mobile phones and ICT use among Indian digital natives have been studied recently (Rangaswamy and Cutrell, 2012; Singh and Goyal, 2009), photo tagging practices among this age group has not been addressed yet. …