As We Now Think

Continuing in my survey of existing academic work on social network sites, this post will focus on some of the work of Nicole Ellison, Cliff Lampe and charles Steinfield, three professors at Michigan State. Their work is central to much of my thinking, as it provides strong data on the context of use of social network sites. Much of their work draws on survey and interview data from MSU undergrads over the past several years. Although I am not certain, I believe I may have participated in one of these surveys as an undergrad myself.

Note: Each of these articles provide a lot more detail and theoretical models than I could possibly cover in this post. My intention here is to provide a brief overview of the results of each study, not to cover them in-depth. For further information, I would recommend reading the articles themselves.

Their first collaboration, A Face(book) in the Crowd: Soical Searching vs. Social Browsing examines a fundamental issue of SNSs: what users do on such sites. Specifically, they explore whether the primary function of Facebook (as reported by users) is to expand one’s social network by finding new connections or to nurture existing connections by friending offline contacts. They term the two activities ’social browsing’ and ’social searching’, respectively.

As users familiar with Facebook would probably guess, the researchers found that respondents were far more likely to report social searching than social browsing. This provides early evidence (ca. 2006) of what is now abundantly clear: SNSs are distinct from previous forms of online communities in that they more closely mirror the offline world.

There are a few other interesting implications in the study. One is that, in less than two years, Facebook had reached near-ubiquity among MSU undergrads: by their second semester, 95% of students had Facebook profiles, and 69% said they used the site more than 30 minutes a day. Additionally, the researchers found that users (probably correctly) assumed that most users engaged in similar behavior on the site; most believed that their audience was comprised of students and other members of their social network. This finding, the authors suggest, ought to provide a clue when trying to make sense of how users decide to construct their profiles.

Drawing on this work, the authors next wrote A Familiar Face(book): Profile Elements as Signals in an Online Social Network. Here, they analyzed profiles within the (then-) closed MSU network on the site. Using automated scripts, they collected reams of quantitative data in order to test whether the completion of certain fields in the profile (such as high school) would have an independent effect on the number of connections made on the site.

Based on different models, they theorize that different sorts of information will have different effects. For example, the presence of one’s high school should be correlated with a larger number of connections, due to the simplicity of finding former classmates. The effects of other fields is not as clear. For example, would providing information about preferences (such as musical taste) increase the likelihood of friendship?

The findings suggest that populating more fields increases the number of articulated connections on Facebook. Yet the amount of information provided is not strongly associated. Thus, whether a user has filled out a field at all is more important than the detail of information provided. ‘Common referents’, fields such as high school attended, were found to show the strongest correlation with number of friends, which may provide empirical evidence that users are, in fact, articulating actual, offline connections on the site.

The last article that I will cover in this post is The Benefits of Facebook “Friends”: Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites. This is probably the most comprehensive and important paper thusfar produced by the authors. Here, they examine the role of Facebook use in the formation and maintenance of offline (that is, real life) social capital. They provide several hypotheses of the relationship between social capital and Facebook use, but for the sake of simplicity it should suffice to say that they believe that instensity of Facebook use should have a positive correlation with respondents’ perceived social capital.

The data support this idea; independent of other relevant factors, users with high intensity of use were more likely to report having larger social networks and greater ties to their community. This was especially true for users who felt less connected to the university community or had low self-esteem. The authors theorize that Facebook (and likely other SNSs) helped lowered the ‘costs’ of initiating connections with others. Students who might otherwise be too timid to approach others have suddenly found an easy way to create and maintain weak social ties.