Consequences of Online Social Networking - Response

The article “Antecedents and Consequences of Online Social Networking Behavior: The Case of Facebook” (2008) by Adam Acar brings up many interesting questions about the image, feedback and effect of people on social networking sites. The study was conducted in March 2006 at a college with about 450 students, and 94% of them said they had a profile on Facebook.com (71). I didn’t think that the number would be so high considering that this was done five years ago, and reading through the results had me believing that this could have been done anytime between then and now. Although social networking is bigger than ever before, the same elements that the study examined are still in question today—anxiety, self-esteem, body image and personal characteristics.

College students as the demographic have issues like these that are worth examining, and in particular, I had some doubt when I read the hypothesis that “People with lower self-esteem will spend less time online in social networking activities” (68). I believe that introverts looking to seek more perceivable social activity would use Facebook more often, including adding strangers to their online circle of limited communication. Indeed, the findings showed that “the higher the self-esteem, the lower the percentage of strangers” (78) and the hypothesis was rejected. Online social network size is determined by factors like self-esteem, and I tended to notice on the size of social groups on Facebook isn't very realistic to real-life social circles, thanks to the ease of use and the different demographics. Only for the extroverted can the Facebook number of friends really correlate well, so long as they continuously participate on the site.

This was a funny thing that I learned from the article: “poking” other Facebook users, which was something I did when I first signed up for the service years ago, had a gender difference that hadn’t crossed my mind until I thought about who used poking in my early days on Facebook. “Females indicated that they've been "poked" …significantly more than males…and have a higher percentage of strangers in their online networks” (77), and that held true when I first started using Facebook. Poking somebody meant that you had an interest—with feelings, for fun or otherwise—for the recipient, and many back-and-forth poking marathons took place to encourage you to get onto Facebook again and again. Nowadays, Facebook has so much information to give to you that “poking” is almost non-existent, nor should it still be a primary reason to visit the site.

Behavior like that still happens on a smaller scale, but a study with a much larger pool of people and a measuring of the same elements of anxiety levels and image in today’s much larger landscape would be interesting to compare this study to, and I figure that I would not see much difference given the continued usage of social networking within the same college demographic.