Status Blog

My research so far has yielded some interesting results.  I have 38 responses to my survey, and most of them are fairly varied.  All of my participants have been over the age of 18, with most of them in the 22-25 year old range (25 of the 28 participants). There were almost double the number of female participants as male, and most of my participants lived in Virginia, but there were responses from several east coast states.  All but one of the survey participants stated that they used writing in a social capacity, and most of them indicated that they also used it in a casual work capacity as well.  Almost all survey takers indicated that writing was at least somewhat important to them, and fewer but still most of the participants indicated that Facebook was at least somewhat important to them.

There was a huge range in the number of Facebook friends each participant had, with the median falling around 459 friends.  The high number was 1800 and the low was 0, so I'm not sure if that 0 person just didn't have a Facebook or had one but had no friends added.  Most of the survey participants have had a Facebook account for more than four years, and none of them have had one for less than one year.  One of the questions with the most even distribution of answers was Question 9, which asked how much time each participant spent on Facebook per day.  Most people answered that they spent more than 20 minutes per day on Facebook, with the most falling between 20-50 minutes per day.

After the general demographic and usage statistic questions, I posed questions asking about how Facebook affected daily life for participants.  The first asked about the effect of Facebook on work habits, and most people answered that it hadn't positively or negatively affected them.  A few of the responses indicated that Facebook was indeed distracting, but if they didn't have it, they would have just found other distractions.  Some answered that Facebook was blocked on their work computers, and some indicated that they just checked it on breaks and that it wasn't detrimental to their ability to concentrate.  Of course, some also indicated that it was distracting and that they got less work done.

A much larger group of people indicated that Facebook was a big distraction from schoolwork, but this question also didn't apply to some of the survey takers who weren't in school, so there was a smaller audience.  As far as Facebook's effect on social life, most people (25 survey takers) agreed that it had a positive one.  Several people indicated that it was useful for keeping in touch with people you probably wouldn't see often otherwise, especially in the case of military relocations. 6 people indicated that it had negatively affected their social lives, mostly because they made less of an effort to see people offline.  One of the more interesting sets of answers came from the question about how Facebook affected writing ability.  Most people indicated that either it didn't affect their writing ability at all, or that it positively affected them because it's a public forum and they didn't want to be judged for poor grammar and spelling in front of all their friends.

One question asked whether or not people considered Facebook interactions to be writing.  This set of answers turned out fairly close, with 55% of people voting yes and 45% voting no.  Some people responded that it was a form of communication, but that they didn't consider it writing except in the cases of people who posted poetry and other forms of creative writing.  The last question asked how the participant feels about Facebook, and by far the most popular answer was "I like it but I don't need it."

Based on my research so far, I've learned that much of the hype about Facebook negatively affecting writing ability has been disproved,  if the opinions of the subjects are to be believed.  Most people who have taken my survey believe that Facebook has made them better writers because they don't want to look stupid in front of their friends, which is something I haven't seen in any journal article yet.  I'm going to attempt to gain a wider audience of survey takers in the next few weeks to give me a better research sample, and I think I'm aiming for 50 participants at this point.

Research Blog 5: The Faces of Facebookers

Zywica, Jolene, and James Danowski. "The Faces of Facebookers: Investigating Social Enhancement and

      Social Compensation Hypotheses; Predicting Facebook™ and Offline Popularity from Sociability and 

      Self-Esteem, and Mapping the Meanings of Popularity with Semantic Networks." Journal of Computer-

      Mediated Communication 14.1 (2008): 1-34.EBSCOhost. Web. 15 Nov. 2010. <http://ehis.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.odu.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?hid=120&sid=aeb748bf-48d8-44d9-9284-d18b92f4cbee%40sessionmgr115&vid=3>

Jolene Zywica and James Danowski’s article addressing the popularity of Facebook users online and offline started out with two hypotheses from previous studies as to the relationship between offline and online popularity.  The Social Enhancement hypothesis, “Rich get Richer,” stated that the people who were considered popular offline would become more popular through Facebook usage.  The Social Compensation hypothesis, “Poor get Richer,” would mean that people who were unpopular offline would become more popular via Facebook and have many more virtual friends than they do real life friends. 

The research builds from these two theories, eventually concluding that in the case of Facebook, neither is necessarily true because online popularity reflects offline popularity. Unlike many other SNSs, people on Facebook are more likely to add friends that they’ve already met in real life, which was assumed to mean that the number of Facebook friends a person has is similar to the number of friends they have offline. There was quite a bit of variance on that matter, however, because the research found that younger people tend to exaggerate their self images online and added lots of people without any particular care for how well (if at all) they know the person. The research examines what it really means to be popular online versus offline, and finds that offline and online popularity are entirely different.

I would recommend this article to other social media scholars, especially ones focusing on the same field that I’ve chosen, which pertains to relating social media personas to the offline counterparts.  The research was conducted via a long survey which was presumably distributed to people across many age groups because of the wide age range the results cover, which is similar to the research I’m doing for this class.  I feel that a survey with the option for comments allows research participants to quickly and effectively articulate their feelings on the subject without feeling overwhelmed or like they’re giving up a huge amount of time to participate.

Research Blog 4 - Tomorrow Will Not Be Like Today

Williams, Bronwyn T. "" Tomorrow Will Not Be Like Today": Literacy and Identity in a World of Multiliteracies." Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 51.8 (2008): 682-86. Academic Search Complete. Web. 15 Oct. 2010. .

“‘Tomorrow will not be like today’: Literacy and identity in a world of multiliteracies” by Bronwyn T.Williams addresses the way young people interact socially online and offline in the age of social media.  The article opens with a description of an adolescent girl and her day after she gets home from school.  She and a friend call each other on the phone and multitask with ICQ, a MOO, homework, private chats, and the phone conversation.  The girl’s activities aren’t unique to her, however, because Williams interviews other students with very similar habits.  The generation currently in its teens is known for doing a thousand things at once, and this article provides an example in the form of a direct quote from that particular teen.

Similarly to a few of our readings so far, Williams points out that identities online are much different from identities offline, even referencing the 90’s comic caption, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog,” that we discussed in class.  People can form their online selves in a way that would be more difficult offline, in a way that we can more easily hide physical and cultural characteristics.  


Williams suggests that our online involvement with pop culture has influenced our ways of creating online identities, because of the way it shapes our social interactions through sites such as MySpace and Facebook.  “Students I have talked with tell me that the song a person has playing on a MySpace page, or the list of that person’s favorite movies, may be a decisive factor in determining whether to interact with the person online. In fact, some scholars (Jenkins, 2006; Livingstone, 2002) have pointed out that

popular culture is one of the most powerful organizing forces in determining where young people go online and with whom they interact.” (684) The end of the article points out that Facebook and other social networking tools could be good learning tools as well, and could be used to bring classrooms closer together.

I would definitely recommend this article.  It was well written and insightful on the topic of the younger generation’s use of social media and its potential uses within the classroom.  Harnessing the community aspect of social networking for the good of the class seems like the logical next step, since its rise in popularity.