Uncovering facebook photo tagging culture and practices among digital natives

Adoption 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.