Tag Archives: Facebook

Oct
17
2012

weak ties seems to be a misleading monkier for such a useful device

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The opportunity to connect with a broad audience with minimal cost has a sizable return on investment for individuals with a large network of weak ties.  Those who utilize social networking sites do so for many different reasons. For some, social capital comes in the form of validation. These individuals get their benefit by the number of comments and likes on their content. For others, their social capital may be the opportunity to ask questions and receive almost immediate responses from a diverse group of people within their online network. Weak ties within one’s network can be utilized to provide an individual with more varied information. As Vitak and Eliison state, people may even prefer asking questions via status update over using a search engine as it provides an additional opportunity to interact with the responses to their query (2012).

 There may be additional benefits to those who have difficulty socializing in person. As Ellison, Lampe, Steinfield and Vitak found in their study With a Little Help From My Friend,” those lower in self-esteem reported greater benefit in terms of bridging social capital from their Facebook use than those with higher self-esteem.”(2011). Several reasons for this are explored from better control over self-presentation to lack of non-verbal cues found in traditional in-person interaction (Burke, Kraut, Marlow, 2011). Additionally, there was evidence that online interaction produced some side effects that were surprising to me. In particular the evidence from Hampton, Sessions and Her (2009) as presented in Social Capital on Facebook: Differentiating Uses and Users that there may be less racial and political prejudice in those that post and share regularly online (2012). I don’t think this is saying that the internet is curing social awkwardness or prejudice, but it is opening up opportunities for people to communicate in new ways and removing barriers to what were once taboo topics.

As for myself, as a result of “context collapse”, I do censor myself a great deal on Facebook in particular. Now that it seems everyone is on it, I’m not as willing to share information or opinions through that medium as I once was in the .edu era. Only the most sanitized of content seems to be appropriate to share to everyone. Yes, Facebook has given me the option to sort people into sub-groups to give me better control over who I share with, but honestly, I’m far too lazy to utilize that feature. It would take forever to sort my “friends” into sub-categories and it is simply too much work for the pay off.  As Ellison and Vitak cite from Hogan (2010), “when disclosures cannot be selectively distributed to different audiences, users may choose to self-censor posts so that only the most banal content is shared with their network” (2012). I imagine that a lot of people, aside from the 10% of super users, are self-censoring the same way I do. So despite the usefulness of my large network of weak ties, I’m under utilizing them as a result of context collapse.

Oct
14
2012

Social Capital, Social Norms, and Social Networks

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I was intrigued by Ellison et al.’s (2011) distinction between social networking sites (i.e., Facebook) and other computer-mediated communication sites (i.e., online dating sites). Although I never really thought of such sites as similar, it’s true that they both facilitate communication between users. But it’s also true that for the most part, SNS members use the sites to enhance existing, offline relationships rather than create new ones with strangers. In fact, the social norms that have established around Facebook might even consider connecting with people we don’t know to be “creepy”. But the whole point of using online dating sites is to connect with someone you don’t already know offline. After all, if members used such sites to connect with people they already knew, they would probably already be dating, rendering the online dating site useless!

However, this distinction between SNSs and other CMC sites caused me to reflect on what I’ll refer to as “the early days of Facebook”…back when users had to have a .edu account to join. I can remember receiving friend requests from other students at my small, private university who I had never met before. At the time, I accepted their friend requests and we conversed by posting on each others’ walls (because, of course, commenting on wall posts was a feature that was still several years away) until we met in person, usually by chance at some common event. Then, it came time for my first official “I have too many friends on Facebook…I should probably go through my friend list and get rid of some of them” moment, which came sometime after the foundation had started to be laid for the aforementioned social norms surrounding Facebook. Throughout this purging process, I thought to myself, “Wow, I remember becoming Facebook friends with so-and-so, but we never ended up becoming friends offline.” It was, and still is, a strange feeling to watch Facebook norms and etiquette change in such a short period of time. I can only wonder…what do the next five years, one year, even just six months hold for the ever-changing norms surrounding SNSs?

Burke, Kraut, and Marlow (2011) related News Feed content to small talk, which I thought was quite the interesting analogy. Knapp and Vangelisti (2003) argue that small talk is “a proving ground for both new and established relationships”. These points made me consider some of the Facebook friends who I used to be close to but have grown apart from in recent years. I figured we grew apart due to distance, and while that may be true, I realize that often, when I read their broadcasted information on SNSs, our interests are no longer all that similar and we have grown apart in more ways than just distance. While I realize that growing apart from friends as your life progresses is nothing new, it’s interesting how an innovation such as the Facebook News Feed can bring it to your attention. SNS profiles reflect what is important in the lives of users, and as users take on new phases in their lives, the information they share will reflect such changes – and their connections are likely to notice.

Oct
11
2012

a life in photos and logging off

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I’ve been waiting to read more about what our classmate Kevin so eloquently described as “collapse of context” in our social media identities. I think for the majority of us that joined Facebook in the .edu era, this is especially true. There were already two or three years’ worth of college photos of us on our Facebook profiles when we entered the job market and worse, our mothers joined the network. Gilpin hits the nail on the head in the first two pages when she describes us having to construct an identity on these sites that is appropriate for a variety of groups (2012). I’m an integrated (work me, school me, family me, professional me) personification of myself online that has evolved over time into less of a true representation of myself than any real interaction with me in person. However, that is not to say that anything I put up is insincere. Just as those who participated in the Twitter study from this article, the social media content I produce is not “wholly representative” of me (Gilpin, 2012).

Interestingly enough, the photos of me on Facebook could tell a fairly accurate chronological story of the highlights of my life over the last six to seven years. I’ve always been someone that keeps a lot of pictures, but the widespread acquisition of point and shoot photos via the mobile phone have taken it to a new level. As Mendelson and Papcharissi bring up in their article, taking pictures of an event has been integrated in the experience of the actual event (2012). They also state via Barthes and Jacobs (1981) that photos provide proof of an experience (Mendelson and Papcharissi , 2012). I wonder if this will have a long term effect on the way millennials and the generations after recall memories. Will they be able to recall events as clearly as older generations without the cue of photos? The other element mentioned in the article that really struck me was the “moving map” concept. Our lives are somewhat documented through these public and shared photos so for ourselves and for others it become an ever growing representation of chronological events of our lives. Mine only moves forward from age 20 or so. What ramifications, if any, will this have for those that have been logged in since adolescence? Or worse, those whose parents have been posting pictures online of them since birth. Will their bosses eventually have access to middle school dance photographs due to the magic of “tagging”? Talk about collapse of context.

I really think Danah Boyd and I could be friends, at least until we had argument that could only be settled by Wikipedia. In her article Participating in the Always-On Lifestyle, she often dismisses the assumptions of social media skeptics. She argues that those who take advantage of the platform of social media are not are not the exhibitionists that some assume them to be, but are in fact simply “taking advantage of the affordances of these technologies to connect with others in a way that they feel is appropriate” (Boyd, 2012). However, I do think that social media has given an outlet those who were either already predisposed for exhibition or has awaken a latent need in others. I would say that only about 10% of my online network take advantage of the share button more than once a month, but those 10% seem deafening at times. Admittedly, I have complete control over what I’m exposed to online, and I choose not to “un-follow” those who post more than I want to know or are posting opinions I don’t share. That says more about me than anything, and I suspect others currently using their Facebook account to watch more than post are the same. They may be sharing in a way “they feel is appropriate” as Boyd states, but not everyone is going to share that opinion (2012). However, those who disapprove are largely going to be those not in the millennial generation, and older generations thinking everything is going to you-know-where because of the kids is nothing new. Boyd is correct that we all need to find a balance in this new world of 24 hour connectedness, which is why I’m turning my phone off during dinner.