‘Looking at’, ‘Looking up’ or ‘Keeping up with’ People: Motives and Uses of Facebook

In this paper Adam Joinson explores the motivations of people using Facebook and the gratification they gain from such uses. The paper was written in 2008 at a time when Facebook was still relatively new. Most studies at the time had focused on campus-based use of Facebook and had not considered the gratification aspect to Facebook use. Joinson uses a two-part study to better understand the motivations of people using Facebook.

The first part of the study explored the most common uses of Facebook with the majority of people unsurprisingly commenting that they used Facebook to keep in touch with people. The second part of the study employed an empirical measurement tool to explore the uses further linking this to the gratification of users. Joinson found that within keeping in touch with people, there were two aspects: surveillance of old contacts and friends and social capital building by investing in their ties to distant friends. One of the big issues Joinson discusses is the idea of Facebook used a surveillance. The paper evidences that people use open profile pages to ‘social search’ and ‘social browse’ and that users often did not change their privacy settings.

On reading the paper, I found the results relating to the use of Facebook to be a little underwhelming as knowledge that we almost take for granted in 2015, particularly the finding that Facebook is used to keep in touch with people. More recent papers have developed this idea further to show that emotions can be shared via social media [1] and that relationships can be developed through the use of Facebook [2].

What sparked my interest the most was the discussion around privacy settings. In my opinion, there has been a marked change since 2008 as people become more aware of what an ‘open’ Facebook profile actually means from a surveillance point of view. A study by Blasbalg et al. from 2012 [3] which focused on students’ understanding and use of Facebook’s privacy settings show that most people were concerned about privacy and felt they had taken steps to make their profiles more private. From the same year, a study focusing on the wider population showed users were aware of the threat of surveillance from people not on the friends list and had taken steps to mitigate this [4].

With more people becoming aware of the issues surrounding surveillance in todays ‘Big Brother’ society from the government’s surveillance of social media [5], to the study by Kramer [6] where Facebook users’ newsfeeds were manipulated without their knowing. It has prompted more awareness of privacy settings of our social media accounts.

The paper I have chosen this week is ‘Facebook and Privacy: It’s Complicated’ and it builds on the privacy aspects from this paper.

[1] Kramer, A. D. (2012, May). The spread of emotion via Facebook. InProceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 767-770). ACM.

[2] Burke, M., & Kraut, R. E. (2014, April). Growing closer on facebook: changes in tie strength through social network site use. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 4187-4196). ACM.

[3] Blasbalg, J., Cooney, R., & Fulton, S. (2012). Defining and exposing privacy issues with social media. Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, 28(2), 6-14.

[4] Johnson, M., Egelman, S., & Bellovin, S. M. (2012, July). Facebook and privacy: it’s complicated. In Proceedings of the eighth symposium on usable privacy and security (p. 9). ACM.

[5] Damon, A. (2013, May 9). Domestic Spying and Social Media: Google, Facebook “Back Doors” for Government Wiretaps. Retrieved November 2, 2015, from http://www.globalresearch.ca/domestic-spying-and-social-media-google-facebook-back-doors-for-government-wiretaps/5334449

[6] Kramer, A. D., Guillory, J. E., & Hancock, J. T. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(24), 8788-8790.