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The Social Brain Hypothesis (Dunbar, 1998) tested on Facebook, using generic behavioural closeness metrics (number of friends who people a) post on their wall, status updates or photos; or b) message/chat with), by the social network’s in-house sociologist Cameron Marlow.
from The Economist (26 Feb 2009): Social networks: Primates on Facebook
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Adamic, L. A., Lento, T.M. and Fiore, A.T. (2012). How You Met Me. ICWSM’12 short paper.
full text pdf
According to their analysis of responses of more than 2.5 million posts to the popular Facebook meme, “Leave one memory of how you met me…” from July 2010 to Nov 2011, the team identify trends in the source of connections made on the social network.
A really excellent analysis.
Fantastic graph detailing differences in categories by age (a significant categorical difference). Majority of responses across all age groups - by a mile - is school, although this reduces in number as respondents get older. Work is next popular for respondents of all age groups except <18 years old, whose second most-frequent connection is “birth”, denoting a parent, sibling or other family member.
Only gender differences:
Men were 57% more likely to meet a friend through sports than women, while women were 34% more likely than men have befriended a neighbor.
As for future research, the authors propose:
There may also be some close ties, e.g. siblings and spouses, who play a disproportionate role in shaping individuals social networks in ways that have not been studied on a large scale.
Facebook is clearly therefore more about reinforcing existing relationships than forging new ones, echoing a recent comment at a lecture I gave from an undergraduate student, “if you want to make new friends, don’t go to Facebook. Go to a dating site.”
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Johnson, K. A. (2011). The effect of Twitter posts on students’ perceptions of instructor credibility. Learning, Media and Technology, Vol 36(1): 21-38.
full text pdf
A small-scale study that shows an increase in students’ perceptions of instructor credibility (competence, trustworthiness & caring) as a function of self-disclosure on Twitter. Specifically there was evidence for an increase in ratings of credibility if the instructor used the microblogging platform to tweet about personal information.
Interestingly, there was no evidence of an effect between social-only tweets (greatest credibility of all) and a combination of social and instructional tweets, or instructional-only tweets and the combination of social and instructional tweets.
I like this explanation:
No longer do teachers need to use class time to reveal bits of personal information about themselves: instead, this revelation of information can take place outside of class in a forum where students can choose whether to look at it.
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A great position paper about how our apparent nonsense on twitter and facebook actually serves an important social function.
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Rainie, L., Horrigan, J., Wellman, B. & Boase, J. (2006, Jan 25). The Strength of Internet Ties, Pew Internet & American Life Project.
A large-scale study of the effects of the web on social capital and relationships between Americans. Published in 2006, it focusses less on social networks like Facebook and more on tech like email.
Positive in general. “Part of everyday life”. Useful in putting social networks in motion when people “need help with important issues in their lives” because people have more active ties with a broader range of people than offline.
Summary of the findings:
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Warning: you can’t make real friends online | Technology | The Guardian
Research from 2007 by Dr. Will Reader of Sheffield Hallam University.
You just have to know what to look for when you’re trying to identify how close virtual friends are.
I found “tells” of friendship closeness in my PhD research, by measuring “closeness” as degrees of perceived trust, credibility and group prototypicality, and the degree to which virtual contacts are considered to be sources of social comparison.
But there are many ways researchers who spend much of their time measuring relationships - particularly social network analysts - try to delineate the contents of a connection between people. Some choose to look at the semantic differences defined by the target population (Diane Kirke even found that her population distinguished between “friends” and “pals”), while some look at behaviours, like the amount of communication that passes between people (e.g., Everett Rogers).
Here are other ways you can identify closeness/distance in online relationships, pulled a talk I gave to Ubiquitous Computing students at the University of Nottingham:
Technologically, some people choose to look at the number links between people, say hypertext links between blogs in the blogosphere, or the number of times people refer to one another in instant message chat. On a technology like Twitter, you can look to see who follows who, if the follower follows the followee (aka a reciprocal relationship), and, on top of that, how often they @ one another. Rogers calls that a ’communication closness’, and yes, it’s interesting, but I don’t think it captures everything.
In fact, I feel that if you want to get to the nitty gritty of what defines friendship, you have to look at the psychological features of closeness. Across a vast body of literature about online and offline closeness, I focus on trust. But how do you capture trust relationships through bits and bytes? By identifying who’s giving who money? That’s one way. But the more meat-space way is to ask, outright, who one trusts, or who one feels close to. That was what I had to do.[In 2006-2008] I studied the people who use Second Life, the online virtual world that became very popular a few years ago. I asked over 750 users users of SL about their almost 6,000 connections. What I found was that indeed, there was a spectrum of closeness relationships between people who didn’t know one another offline, and that this closeness developed in the same way as offline friendships and relationships develop: through sharing, through disclosure, through reciprocation of personal information and through perceptions of similarity. Deb Levine wrote about this a decade ago in her paper, “Virtual Attraction: What rocks your boat”.
Why is this interesting? Well, because many of the theories about how people influence one another’s attitudes and behaviours focus on friendship. The closer the friendship, the more likely attitudes and behaviours will be similar. And if there is the possibility of people influencing one another online, we should understand how they operationalise friendship.
Each community has its own tells. Finding them is about tapping into the community and applying insider knowledge.
At last year’s Cyberpsychology & Computer Psychology conference, then-PhD student Rob Comber presented the results of his close analysis of “friendship” in youth-oriented social network Bebo.
These are his slides.
In them, he describes the shortcomings of this technology (and most social network sites) for close friendship, particularly how the system doesn’t allow for the demarcation of “close” versus “strong” friendships. He makes an important point in his conclusion:
Viewed in isolation this would suggest that Bebo users don’t experience an increased sense of closeness with others
- It may even appear to reduce closeness
However, that is not the case
- Users participate as a way to signify participation in their social world
- Friends lists are meaningful displays of friendship
I’ve interviewed Oxford Professor Robin Dunbar on a couple of occasions over the last few years, asking the evolutionary anthropologist most renowned for identifying the “Dunbar Number” - the theoretical maximum number of connections for a functioning human social group - about the effects of the Web on friendship.
This is one of those interviews, from The Observer in March 2010.
You can see & hear more of Prof Dunbar’s thoughts on the effects of Facebook and other web techs in the video (and read them in the first chapter of his book of collective essays, How Many Friends Does One Person Need?, but here’s a relevant little titbit:
Can we manage to have meaningful relationships with more than just the old numbers? Yes, I can find out what you had for breakfast from your tweet, but can I really get to know you better? These digital developments help us keep in touch, when in the past a relationship might just have died; but in the end, we actually have to get together to make a relationship work.
In the end, we rely heavily on touch and we still haven’t figured out how to do virtual touch. Maybe once we can do that we will have cracked a big nut.
During the filming of the BBC series Virtual Revolution, I tested the Dunbar number on a sample of me, to see how applicable it was to my social networking experience. Check out the results here.
Kraut, R., Patterson, M., Lundmarkm, V., Kiesler, S., Mukopadhyay, T. & Scherlis, W. (1998). Internet Paradox: A Social Technology That Reduces Social Involvement and psychological Well-Being? American Psychologist, 53 (9): 1017-1031.
(pdf)
The seminal “internet causes social ills” article that most scare headlines are based on, despite it being published in 1998.
Here’s the abstract:
The Internet could change the lives of average citizens as much as did the telephone in the early part of the 20th century and television in the 1950s and 1960s. Researchers and social critics are debating whether the Internet is improving or harming participation in community life and social relationships. This research examined the social and psychological impact of the lnternet on 169 people in 73 households during their first 1 to 2 years on-line. We used longitudinal data to examine the effects of the Internet on social involvement and psychological well-being. In this sample, the Internet was used extensively for communication. Nonetheless, greater use of the Internet was associated with declines in participants’ communication with family members in the household, declines in the size of their social circle, and increases in their depression and loneliness. These findings have implications for research, for public policy, and for the design of technology.
The most important thing to note about this study is that the authors published a follow-up in 2002 - Internet Paradox Revisited (pdf) - that retracts many of their findings. Here’s that abstract:
Kraut et al. (1998) reported negative effects of using the Internet on social involvement and psychological well-being among new Internet users in 1995–96. We called the effects a “paradox” because participants used the Internet heavily for communication, which generally has positive effects. A 3-year follow-up of 208 of these respondents found that negative effects dissipated. We also report findings from a longitudinal survey in 1998–99 of 406 new computer and television purchasers. This sample generally experienced positive effects of using the Internet on communication, social involvement, and well-being. However, consistent with a “rich get richer” model, using the Internet predicted better outcomes for extraverts and those with more social support but worse outcomes for introverts and those with less support.
How has the most revolutionary innovation of our time - the Internet - transformed our world? What does it mean for the modern family? How has it changed our concepts of privacy? Of celebrity? Of love, sex and hate?
This is the online reporter's notebook for The Untangling the Web column in The Observer newspaper and the Untangling the Web book, published September 2012 by Guardian Books.
It's the collection of interviews, links, photos, videos and brainstorms that are feeding this compendium of the latest research about the social effects of the online world.
Contribute your ideas, stories and experiences by email to aleks.krotoski.freelance@guardian.co.uk or via Twitter, by tagging your tweets with #UTTW or @aleksk.
Aleks Krotoski has been writing about interactivity since 1999. She has a PhD in social psychology, focussing on relationships and influence online. Aleks is the host of the Tech Weekly podcast.
Read Aleks' Observer column at guardian.co.uk/untanglingtheweb
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