Papers
In this response I will discuss two papers, one which examines 'boundary regulation' in social networking and another which discusses the personality of popular facebook users.
Social Realities
In the early days of "social networking" your online identity seldom matches your real world identify. Your online friends were friends you knew online or often through the site itself. Sites like MySpace and Nexopia followed this practice. This lack of connection with a real world identity seemed to date back to the architecture chosen for the internet itself. But when Facebook emerged it made a specific emphasis on representing real world relationships digitally. This was perhaps what set Facebook apart from it's competitors, this direct connection gave it numerous advantages, since people are more interesting in their real world friends, which leads them to spend more time on the site. More real world data means more real world advertising dollars as well.
But this change had some serious consequences. People who presented themselves to different people differently now had all of their relationships collected into one bag. Who would they present themselves as?
The researchers of the boundary regulation conducted an interview study of people who solved this by created multiple profiles. They pompously turn this phenomenon into technical jargon by calling it multiple profile maintenance and giving it the acronym MPM. The research find exactly what you'd expect. Some people (but not even close to a majority) respond to the problem described earlier by just creating multiple profiles. The differences between the profiles range from completed disconnected to basically obvious or transparent. People provided exactly the reasons you'd expect for this. Mostly they want privacy, to limit their posts and social networking activities to a selected set of people. They also are afraid that people will judge them for these sites, which are sometimes (but not usually) accessible to outsiders. Otherwise it's just an explicit attempt to appear to be a different person in the eyes of different groups. One suspects that this kind of a system might become awkward if someone discovered you kept different profiles which they were explicitly not included in.
A much more interesting subject is why people are adding certain groups of people. Probably most people are not purposely duplicitous with their actual friends. It's more likely that people wish to present a public front to bosses, coworkers and acquaintances. It's possible that people are now feeling a social obligation to add these people to social networking and then feel the need to screen or manager boundaries with them.
Popular People
Another paper about popular Facebook users attempts to correlate the number of Facebook friends users have to some personality traits (and other variables). Interestingly the researchers use the results of a Facebook application ... which is presented on the users profile as input for their analysis. They claim that they use 'quality metrics' to remove people who are answering randomly or unseriously. They do not seriously address whether people are answering this questions in a specific way to get a specific outcome. They show a selection of statistical correlations between these personality types and the number of Facebook friends.
A more interesting study would be to examine communication versus social networking. Tools exist that allow users to monitor who they communicate most often with and these could be accompanied with other tracking metrics. This might let researchers compare this tighter social network to the people who are listed as friends on a social network.
No comments:
Post a Comment