Observe & Report

Several research projects being done on the social network site, Facebook, are described in an interesting article in the New York Times: On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data.

Some interesting findings include:
“Researchers learned that while people perceive someone who has a high number of friends as popular, attractive and self-confident, people who accumulate “too many” friends (about 800 or more) are seen as insecure.”

‘I belong to many, many sites and on each site I have a different profile and different (although overlapping) set of friends…

People put real social weight on the number of Facebook friends you have, almost as if Facebook friends are a actual signifier of something. So even though we know that in many cases these aren’t “real” friends, some people still perceive those people with more as somehow more popular, attractive, etc. More realistically we can use see this as another signifier at how popular and social network sites have become.

“Students who reported low satisfaction with life and low self-esteem, and who used Facebook intensively, accumulated a form of social capita linked to what sociologists call “weak ties.”

A weak tie is someone you meet at a party, not a friend or family member. Weak ties are significant, scholars say, because they are likely to provide people with new perspectives and opportunities that they might not get from close friends and family’.

Weak ties is an interesting theory because it explains why acquaintances (not necessarily friends) are so valuable to know. They give us opportunities that lie just outside our normal daily routine and introducing us to new things, as they live in quite different worlds than we do.

If Facebook is really good at making weak ties, then its worth might be more than simply cultivating the friendships we already have.

‘…Each profile is a unique view into my life, and as such is a valid view, but is only a small part of my entire identity.’

It’s exciting that researchers are going to Facebook (and other social network sites) and doing research. As the article notes, there is a tremendous amount of data there to be discovered.

However, I do agree with Jushua Porter who who questions the danger, that research looks at these sites as representing the larger part of each person’s life, ‘…I belong to many, many sites and on each site I have a different profile and different (although overlapping) set of friends. Each profile is a unique view into my life, and as such is a valid view, but is only a small part of my entire identity… I know that its easy to look at a Facebook profile and assume that this is what the person is all about, but on the whole I think we’re so good at projecting a certain face to the public that we don’t even realize how much we leave out.’