A Look at Unsociability on Facebook

We propose unsociability as a novel perspective to approach and support online social interactions. With examples taken from focus group discussions, we highlight the need of users to save face in their online interactions within social network sites. We claim that people follow a “social-over-technical” pattern on Facebook, as they base their interactions on their social understanding of this site instead of on its technical capabilities. These social norms and patterns challenge social translucence which has for more than a decade been recognized as one of the cornerstones of social computing systems.