The Facebook Project Email Q&A

Questions for Collide Magazine

2011-10-25T21:53:00.000-07:00

I was invited to give a response for Collide Magazine at Azusa Pacific University in California. Something of an update, I spose-

What does digital identity really mean and how does it play a role in our current culture?

I think this one is pretty hard to answer. We've struggled to explain what identity constitutes and means without consideration of the internet - I think it's potentially just as complicated there too. In short I'd say digital identity is constructed, but by a different set of forces than identity in a general regard. Rather than blab about it here, I've copied an old draft of my unpublished masters paper here, check pages 22-49 for a comprehensive answer.

How do we positively/negatively use digital identity? What are the dangers?

When identity becomes commodified and sold, codified and transferable and otherwise structured by the architecture of an interface I worry. In other words - we sell identity data to advertisers (or worse, in China it's used to oppress people), we force categorical imperatives on something innately dynamic and subjective, and the structure of systems can promote corrosive hegemonic norms (see my discussion on the missing box here - http://facebookprojectqa.blogspot.com/2011/01/filling-in-missing-box.html - there is no category for race/ethnicity/nationality on Facebook and this is a problem!).

That said I think the internet can be a place where new identities can be explored in a positive fashion. A person who identifies as gay may not be able to do so openly to their family, but could admit their sexuality openly to friends or communities on the internet, and this could be quite empowering. It used to be that the internet was a place of anonymous deindividuated people (who were actually mostly of a particular class/education/race) but now I think digital identity is regularly tied to offline identity and the internet is full of more kinds of people; Facebook was the beginning of this wave. With Facebook other people would tag pictures of you and talk to you and this data would help to construct who you were as much as your presentation of information, not unlike face-to-face life. There are exceptions to this, of course, like in fantasy videogames and comments on YouTube videos, but it is the shift.

How has digital identity changed over the history of Facebook/your experience? Where do you see it headed?

I think it's certainly changed a lot since I studied the network. Remember I started out with it at a time when researchers, the news media and parents didn't know what it was and didn't take it seriously (2006). At the time it was the domain of college students and college student wannabes. Now I think it's become a much more international network and has been integrated into the lives of people of many ages, educations and backgrounds. I would say that the social norms of the network have become much more diverse, and with them we've seen shifts in the performance of identity.

Questions from a High Schooler

2011-03-18T01:57:00.000-07:00

Why did you start writing articles about social networking sites for New York Times?

To the best of my knowledge, I never have. Where did you hear this? I am a PhD student and researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and for the extent of my work towards a masters in Sociology I worked on the Facebook Project. I wrote several papers on racism, sexism, identity, privacy, and social interactions on Facebook at the time it was just coming out, around 2006-8.

What are your personal opinions about Facebook?

This is a very broad question. Facebook, in many ways, is a reflection of normal human social life, with some quirks and twists. On the whole I think it has been quite transformative, and has bettered many people's lives. I'm curious to see where the company's policies go in the future, in many ways they've been more progressive. As the site reaches ubiquity (it has in many contexts already) I do wonder if it will start to seem a little banal, if not mundane. Personally I like it well enough to use it consistenty, though lately with the intensification of my dissertation process I've been spending less time there.

Do you think Facebook is a positive or negative contribution to teens today?

Generally most social scientists would answer this question by saying 'potentially both.' I think the more interesting question would be to give examples of positive and negative impacts on the lives of teens and adults alike. I think Facebook could act as facilitator for what Henry Jenkins (2006) calls participatory culture and it does give teens another medium or public to be with friends. The general trend with ICT adoption suggests that eventually the savvy users of internet social media will grow up and become parents themselves, and places like Facebook may cease to be third spaces (outside of school and home) hidden from parents. The internet does pose a lot of risks - with nearly unlimited access to information and little filtering of content comes great power and responsibility, it's hard to teach teens, who are often quite conflicted over their sense of identity and agency in the world, how to deal with this power appropriately. I wouldn't advocate limiting their access to Facebook, but instead suggest that educators and parents learn about what it means to them, and educate them about the kinds of things they ought to be concerned about. Even still, threats like cyberbullying, deindividuation, inadvertent archival/exposure of personal information are quite real. I just don't think the answer is to respond with fear, but to respond with a desire to understand.

How has the increase of Facebook use affected cyber bullying?

This depends on your context. I assume you're talking about American teens, and in this case I just think it provides another context where teens might pick on one another. Facebook has really done a lot to help people deposit aspects of their identity online, and so the stakes for embarrassment and reputation are probably higher, but it's also about what danah boyd calls the invisible audience: you may never know who's looking at your profile, and so you instead anticipate. Conversely people can surf around largely undetected, and my interviews with college students indicated that almost everyone snoops more than they're willing to admit to the general public. As a result of this lack of identity or accountability people might sometimes act in ways they wouldn't ordinarily. This could be good or bad, like a gay person feeling able to come out of the closet online (reconstruction of identity, good) or a person making mean comments anonymously on YouTube videos (the effects of deindividuation, bad).

How can we fix problems Facebook has caused?

I think this depends on the problem. I've given something of an answer to the question of how to shape teen use of Facebook for the better above: education and perspective-sharing. This begins mostly with good digital literacy education, which is something our public school system lacks, for the most part. In fact this is part of the topic of my dissertation.

Filling in the Missing Box

2011-01-06T21:31:00.000-08:00

Reposted from a Facebook note/discussion

A while back I wrote a paper on representation of social identity on Facebook. I made the claim that while the SNS give users the ability to assert their gender, education, age, sexuality and a number of other aspects of who they are the website explicitly lacks any kind of category box for race, ethnicity or nationality. What happens when these items are missing is what I think is an example of colorblind racism: it is assumed these identities don’t matter to people, and we are left with only their pictures and the ‘about me’ section to make judgments about their affiliation. In effect we take away some of their ability to assert who they are and give it to others. A person from Jamaica doesn’t say who they are, instead someone sees their picture (because we all know these are what most people examine first) and just implicitly labels them ‘black’ without any opportunity to engage with their real heritage or assemblage of racial, ethnic and national identity. The same kind of thing happens to people of Latin@ or mixed-ethnic decent, who just become ‘brown’ as well as anyone with an Asian heritage (who are often assumed to be fundamentally ‘foreign’ in America). My girlfriend is a superb example, as many people see her and assume she’s Korean or Chinese, and don’t realize she’s from Kazakhstan (and not at all unusual in her appearance given her origins) and has little in common with people from these cultures. She takes the option of belonging to central Asian groups on Facebook to show, in part, who she is, and the importance of this aspect of her identity. That and the Cyrillic writing all over her wall.

So given this problem, I suggested Facebook add a category up top for these kinds of things, labeled, literally, “Race/ethnicity/nationality,” followed by a blank box where they could say whatever they liked, probably with a reasonable character limit for system and data management needs (shall we say Twitter’s favorite 140 characters?). What I never explored in this paper back in 2008, though, is what would happen if Facebook added this category. Three important outcomes come to mind:

1) At the onset I think there would be a lot of talk about the issue, which I like. People would revisit conversations on the ways these social identities shape us and tell us who we are and there would be a lot of rediscovery or negotiation of group membership, which I like. I think this kind of mass-discussion (several million strong) would be powerful, and on the whole, positive.

2) I’m really interested to see how people would end up using the box. Would they conform to institutionally-driven affiliations like the census categories? Would they invent new ones, or would all of the white people (in the US) just side-step it and write ‘American.’ Might people just use it as a vessel to present their family heritage? How would it look in different countries or among different generations, and would most people just avoid it? Would (or should) Facebook need to highlight that it has been added? What would this all look like?

3) This kind of thing could be measured with computational techniques. Facebook blocks crawler research robots, but still the possibility is there. Studies on Facebook, real social networks and race aren’t actually all that new (see Mayer and Puller 2007), but this would introduce a whole new level of opportunity. Beyond this I think we could find countable evidence of identity movements and cultural affiliations, and track them as they emerge and transform!

Thoughts?

Personality types and social media

2010-06-30T13:28:00.000-07:00

My name is [something] and I am currently writing my masters thesis on the differences in personality of Facebook users and Twitter users to see if they show different characteristics. This research will hopefully be of great interest to businesses, as well as individuals, as it will highlight what type of people use different web services. I would greatly appreciate it if you could publicize my research.I appreciate that you may get many these requests but it would be a great help to me and I believe it will also be an interesting study. If you agree, I can forward the survey link to you.

...I think you may have mistaken my website for a publishing authority! It's just a collection of material from a few researchers, which at this point is somewhat outdated. Regardless I'd be happy to post a link to your survey or put up a copy of your paper online for you to share. I might also be able to provide a little feedback on your research methods - accessing and deciphering something like personality through surveys is often difficult, respondents may have varying self-perceptions and understandings of what it means to be 'introverted' or 'narcissistic.' I do think you could find some commonalities between user groups, however, often people pick communication tools and expression mediums that they feel fit their behaviors and personalities, peer groups and stage in life.

Facebook and young parents, a how to build a conceptual framework

2010-02-24T23:56:00.000-08:00

The idea for my research project to look at young parents (those aged 18-25) use of Facebook.

My reasoning for choosing this specific group is simply through the observation of the field of SNS research concentrating mainly on student groups - and I think non-students may have a very different experience of using SNS for socialising and support - especially young parents who I've seen posting status update after status update about their children! I've tried to look for other research about young parents social support and there doesn't seem to be much focus on young parents social support, especially online social support. Consequently I think there may be an under researched area here.

I'd like to do an exploratory qualitative study, but at the moment I'm struggling to see how I can formulate research questions, so if you have any idea of open questions regarding Facebook as a social function or Facebook as a support function that'd be great.

Offhand I can think of people doing research on use of the internet and online communities for health information and social support, mostly with an emphasis on social capital. An example sequence of readings could go like this:

• Strauss, A. L., Fagerhaugh, S., Suczek, B., & Wiener, C. (1997). Social organization of medical work. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. (Originally published in 1985 by University of Chicago Press.) Chapter 8: The Work of Patients (pp. 191-209). (Negotiation of patients and medical personnel with technology; cooperative work; legitimate peripheral participation; power relationships)

• Pettigrew, K. E. (2000). Lay information provision in community settings: How community health nurses disseminate human services information to the elderly. Library Quarterly, 70(1), 47-85. (Information ecology; social networks; information flow)

• Orgad, S. (2005). The transformative potential of online communication: The case of breast cancer patients’ Internet spaces. Feminist Media Studies, 5(2), 141-161. (Online communities; social capital; invisibility; power)

Now I know you’re not necessarily interested in health, but it’s the same kind of idea – find an older and broad set of ideas or theories (social inclusion, strength of ties, what it means to be a parent, communities of practice or maybe imagined communities, etc…) and then maybe connect them to a discipline or area of study (information science, communication, education, psychology) and build up to a specific example or site of research (Facebook, for instance).

As for the differences in FB use by cultural group I’d say there’s a great deal of work to be done – most SNS research has been on privacy and youth, and as the major immersive college student user base moves on to the work and young adult world (what you’re experiencing) and the system broadens its scope to new countries and late adopters join (parents, middle-aged women in particular) we’re likely to see a complicating of context and diversifcation of social norms – and an even more pressing need for study.

2010-01-13T10:05:00.000-08:00

...I am a sophomore attending [omit] High School in [omit], New York. This year in school, I was chosen to participate in an elite program called Advanced Science Research. In this program, students begin to find a topic of interest and take part in meaningful research. I am extremely interested in learning about the effects of social networking on children and teenagers. I would love to become a published scientist prior to high school graduation. In addition, I hope to enter numerous science competitions such as the Intel Science Talent Search.

While studying and looking over literature, I discovered that you work in the field of social networking and are involved in research regarding Facebook and was intrigued by your research. I was wondering if we could meet to discuss your current projects and discuss the possibility of you being my mentor over the next three years. I understand since you live so far away this will be hard, but if we could possibly coordinate something where I can assist in research over the computer. If you are not available, could you please send me any literature that you think would help me as I begin my scientific journey or can you recommend another scientist that could possibly be my mentor. I know that you must get loads of messages in a day so thank you for your time.

I’m impressed that you’re taking on such ambitious projects at such an early stage in school! The topic you’ve chosen is very broad, so you might want to be careful and focus it a little bit, studying the impacts of social networking websites on youth has many potential dimensions ranging from communication to the making of meaning to influence on social relationships and so much more. You might think about one aspect of Facebook that interests you (ideas: how it’s spreading about in different countries around the world, the way it influences how people get to know one another, its differences and similarities with other ‘traditional’ forms of communication technologies, the way the interface has changed over the years and what this has accomplished, etc…) and then investigate that particular topic. The most commonly addressed topics seem to be those dealing with privacy and identity as well as business growth and valuation, I think you might find it more interesting to explore something less well-known. I’m not sure that I can help you publish anything formally but would be happy to host your work on the project site.

These days I’m not actually specifically researching Facebook, most of that research was done as part of my masters work in sociology a couple of years ago. I’ve left the project website up as a resource to help young and aspiring researchers like yourself. I’d be happy to help provide some support and feedback, but you should be aware I’m just a PhD student and am far from being an accomplished expert in the field. I’m not sure what mentorship involves but if you think it can be covered by occasional emails I might be willing to sign on. Alternatively you might have some luck contacting Jenny Ryan (http://www.jennyryan.net/). As for literature give me a little bit of a more refined version of your topic and I’ll help to pass you appropriate readings. For now you might think about some of these:

boyd, d. m., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.85.5541&rep=rep1&type=pdf

and maybe work by Tufekci: http://userpages.umbc.edu/~zeynep/

Good luck and let me know if you refine your topic a bit!

Facebook users on Batam Island

2009-11-25T01:52:00.000-08:00

I am the midst of collecting data for my Thesis about Facebook. It is about the relation of privacy and productivity towards Facebook. When i look for facebook research online, I saw your website The Facebook Project and look like you're doing Facebook research with your team.

I wonder if you have any suggestion about how can i get the number of Facebook users in Batam islands.

So, yes, as you probably know I did some work on researching Facebook years ago during my time working on my masters in sociology. Back then the answer to your question would have likely been easy, chances are Batam Island would have been categorized as one network (or possibly all of Indonesia). Now that they’ve dissolved the old network sorting system and the associated pages I’m not sure if we can find a very accurate answer. Quickly Googling reveals an O’Reilly presentation that talk about Facebook users by region:

http://www.slideshare.net/oreillymedia/active-facebook-users-by-country-region-june-2007 (slide 13 gets you the counts on Indonesia from 5 months ago, which I know isn’t all that helpful).

Other sources suggest a lot of rapid growth in Indonesia as of late. I suspect that’s maybe what brought your attention to the topic, it seems that many countries go through a period of explosive adoption of Facebook – it’s usually an exciting time when social norms are first being worked out.

It might be possible to contact Facebook on account of a press inquiry and see if they can give you a user estimate, though I doubt they’d be responsive to a researcher. Instead you might be able to construct a reasonable guess based on other measures of connectivity for Batam island. How many people have broadband in that area? Effective Facebook use usually requires a faster connection. Certain portions of the population might be more interested in using it than others. For instance the elderly might be less engaged. By overlaying different population demographics you might be able to narrow it down to a high-range estimate of how many people are Facebook users (or potential ones).

Anyway, suspended from all of this you may also consider how important knowing how many people are active users on Facebook is to your overall study. It might be more important to know what people are doing with it, or what it means to them. This is the sort of information that can be observed or gathered from interviews and might end up being more salient in the long run.

Body Image and Methods

2009-11-25T01:14:00.000-08:00

I am currently working on an image event for my women's studies class in which we are to raise awareness about an issue we've studied in a visually-dominate manner. Our group's idea is to send people to a facebook group (not yet created) that will compare body images of men to women, showing the societal disparity. Before we begin our work on the actual creation of our image(s) we must write a proposal with research on research methods. I was wondering if you would be able to supply any info regarding facebook?

So I don't feel like I have enough information about your project to be helpful. Facebook groups can be a great place to bring people together to share ideas and discuss concepts on forums, they have the advantage (and sometimes disadvantage) of people owning pre-existing accounts that pretty accurately and comprehensively represent their identities. I imagine this project could go in many ways - your research methods should best match your research questions and individual competencies as researchers.

For instance you might do qualitative content analysis (discourse analysis) on the discussions and reactions people have with regards to different pictures. What do people say about them? Does this relate to aspects of their identity (gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity)? How does language choice shape the way people think and talk about body image? Does the discourse only happen in some forms, or does it privilege or disempower some participants? Who's not even involved in the discourse, and does that matter? Is there a history to these relationships or conceptions? This sort of approach would better match people well-versed in literary critical analysis.

Or you might instead post some pictures in the group, ask a bunch of people to look at them, and then conduct interviews or a survey after. Interviews could help to discern how people make sense of the pictures - what their impressions where, what they meant to them or how they spoke. A survey would be more suited to gathering general perspectives, but would constrain their responses to whatever questions and answers the survey designers choose, which could make data uniform and easy to analyze, but also incomplete or reduce its validity.

I think most importantly you should give some thought to picking key research questions. From there you can decide if you want to go about your work inductively (observing what's going on and looking for themes) or deductively (starting with a theory and testing it). Mixing these two methods might be possible, but could be very difficult (and ill-advised) within the same study for a number of reasons.

Automated Data Collection Strategies on Groups

2009-11-25T00:58:00.000-08:00

I am a researcher in [a country] working on a Facebook-based, agenda-setting study. Ideally, I would like to perform an analysis of participation in a specific, public FB group but I have run into a snag. I am trying to capture all of the content on the FB group's wall without resorting to tedious copy and paste methods. Do you know of anyone who has successfully worked with this type of data set or how one would go about automating the copying process?

As far as I know it’s not possible to use webcrawlers or automated data collection programs with Facebook – they have mechanisms built into the site to block or ban users who exhibit inhuman tendencies (like being able to follow a hundred links at a time). Offhand I can think of two workarounds, though. I believe you can set Facebook Page (as in the Facebook Pages platform application, a front/service used by companies and other stakeholders - http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages) to push out to an RSS feed. I think that’ll only capture wall content put up by the page operators, however. The other way you might go about it could be to write a client-side script with Greasemonkey and Firefox or something similar. I think ideally you’d have to visit the page to download it and then perform some kind of programmatic operation on it to sort or refine the data. It might be possible to write a script that could be used in conjunction with a user account that’s always logged on – it would refresh the page say every hour, download it, parse through the code to record the posts, stopping if it encounters an identical one, and appending the text into a file. Lots of work but it might be possible to do without flagging Facebook’s bot-catching mechanisms.

Honestly I haven’t done anything like this so I’d suggest you try contacting Eric Gilbert (at UIUC) or Fred Stutzman (UNC Chapel Hill) and asking them, they’re quite a bit more familiar with the security and programming side of Facebook research.

Compliments and Comments on Facebook

2009-11-25T00:10:00.000-08:00

I am currently writing, or trying to write a paper on compliment responses in the facebook context, which is for my Masters programme. i am practically going bonkers trying to figure out and collect the data for my paper. so, i am hoping that u cud help me. is there any researchers doing a paper on communication in facebook or compliment responses in facebook? and it would b great if u cud give me some tips or points on this matter. thank u very very much

I’m not sure if I understand what you mean when you say ‘compliment responses.’ Are you referring to the comments people can leave in response to posted statements, links and media?

Regardless, I think the question of the best way to collect data is a good one. You should probably pick a research method that fits your research questions and approach. If you have a hypothesis you’d like to test you might think about laying it out in explicit statement form and then determining the criteria or variables that would apply. For instance, you might copy and paste several pages of Facebook wall posts from your newsfeed into a text file and then count the number of times people respond to each other, anticipating that, say, the more a person posts the more likely they are to get responses. You could deepen the analysis by codifying certain words as tied to a type of emotion and then look for changes in the amount of type of responses between individuals. This sort of thing would be done programmatically, and be considered to be a quantitative content analysis. You’d have to be careful about what you say about your results, in this case there would be sample limitations.

Alternatively you might not worry about getting a lot of data, but instead looking closely at a small amount of data to see what it presents. I suspect this angle might work better for you since you seem to be unsure of the best way to go about your project. If you work inductively, and start by making a lot of observations of something you can eventually start to find consistencies and ongoing themes. With enough observation you can begin to construct theories of the greater narratives afoot. For instance, you might take a selection of wall post exchanges that involve comments that happen to be compliments and see what they say. Are they usually initiated by people of one gender? Are the compliments mostly about one type of thing, like a person’s appearance? What might these exchanges say about the discourse of compliments, or the way people think about complimenting one another? The goal here would not be to make global statements based on generalizable data, but instead to help shed some light on the way some people make sense of things or what compliments implicitly mean to them. Or how people are able to give and receive compliments on Facebook.

Youth, Journalism and Facebook

2009-11-25T00:00:00.000-08:00

I'm still exploring possibilities of working on a research where my nine-year-olds could use facebook, probably assuming as young journalists, giving updates of school events. Would appreciate some comments and views from you, with regards to constructing the research qn. Im looking into the areas of writing or digital literacy via fb.Thanks and hope to hear fr u

With regards to your inquiry: I’m not sure that Facebook is a website that’s intended for younger preteen kids. You might consider adopting a tool more specifically design for those age audiences, like Webkinz, Club Penguin, Imbee, Whyville, Panwapa, Beanie Babies, BuildABear, WoogiWorld, or Cybersmartz.

That said, I think the idea of engaging children as potential young-journalists is both progressive and a great way to help them foster some of the core skills and competencies that are essential to digital literacy. One way you might do this would be to establish a class or school blog and invite students to collaborate with one another to create articles for it. They might take pictures of class projects or write a paragraph about their experience on a field trip. You could help them think about key issues in journalism, like their audience and the best way they can convey information. This might also present an opportunity for students to review one another’s work and talk about what they like and dislike about it, effectively helping them to develop critical thinking skills as well as socializing them into proper ways to present feedback while maintaining concern for each other’s feelings.