Dan’s review of week 4 paper: “‘Looking at’, ‘Looking up’ or ‘Keeping up with’ People? Motives and Uses of Facebook”

This paper investigates how and why people used Facebook in 2008 through the use of two studies. The first study was a survey which gathered demographic information and asked participants various questions about how much they used Facebook, what they use it for and what they enjoy doing on it. This first study suggested that the most common usage of Facebook was for users to ‘keep in touch’ with people they already knew, with very few of the participants saying that they used the website as a way to ‘make new contacts’. The second study saw participants being asked to rate the importance of the responses given to the first study on a Likert scale and also give some usage metrics. The results saw that not only did the majority of participants visit Facebook at least once a day, but that their most values functions of the site were “social searching” and “surveillance” related – for example, re-connecting with old friends.

The results also showed that the majority of the participants had changed their Facebook privacy settings from the defaults, with over half of them making their profile more private. Less than a quarter of the participants claimed to have left their privacy settings at the default level — much lower than previous studies had shown. Roughly 20% of participants had actually made their profile details more accessible, with a negative correlation against the user’s age – younger participants were more likely to have made their profile more secure. Joinson suggests that Facebook’s default privacy settings may have been too stringent for those wishing to meet new people. This conclusion is particularly interesting, as in the years following this paper Facebook endured a large amount of public backlash regarding user privacy – culminating in a settlement with the FTC[1]. Of particular concern was the sharing of personal data (even that marked as “private”) with third-party advertisers to create targeted adverts and the NSA mining Facebook user data.

The website was seeing a period of rapid expansion at the time the paper was written, as it had only been fully open for public registration for two years. Joinson notes that in the UK between November 2007 and May 2007 the use of the site increased by 500% and – at the time of his writing – Facebook had around 30 million users, total.  For comparison, the monthly active user count as of August 2015 was 1.49 billion[2] – more than one third of all global Internet users[3], or twice the population of Europe[4]. Joinson admits that in further research it would be prudent to run automated queries when collecting statistics about user profile settings and data, as user reports will likely always carry a degree of inaccuracy. There is also the issue of scale and generalisability – now that the Facebook population is so gargantuan, it is potentially unrealistic to expect that a 200 person study could be representative of users’ motivations across various cultures and continents. Joinson’s study certainly seemed to have been more generalizable in comparison to previous studies – which were limited to campus-based usages of Facebook – but the findings may not be as applicable today as they were in 2008.

As a final note, I would suggest that another reason for using Facebook has emerged since this study – the ubiquity of it as a service. It is probable that a large number of people use Facebook primarily because everyone else does, and they don’t want to be seen as the “odd one out”. Facebook has become so ubiquitous that some will even treat you with suspicion for not using it[5].

My chosen paper for this week is “Understanding motivations for Facebook use: usage metrics, network structure and privacy” (DOI: 10.1145/2470654.2466449). This paper investigates similar factors to Joinson, but also uses Facebook’s API to collect accurate information and provides a more recent insight as it was published in 2013.

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2011/11/facebook-settles-ftc-charges-it-deceived-consumers-failing-keep

[2] https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/

[3] http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

[4] http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/DataQuery/

[5] http://business.time.com/2012/08/08/does-not-having-a-facebook-page-make-you-suspicious-to-employers/