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.