The Benefits of Facebook ‘‘Friends:’’ Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites presented by Nicole B. Ellison, Charles Steinfield and Cliff Lampe conducts one of the first studies on Facebook users, and their offline to online relationship.
The paper was presented back in 2007, almost 10 years ago. The difference between Facebook’s usage back then and these days is quite interesting. I mean the paper talks about a time when an average user used Facebook 20 minutes per day. But now, we are looking at social media addiction. I also liked how the considered the measure of usage of Facebook. Rather than just counting how long one has been online, they considered how many friends a user have, how much time they are actually active using Facebook, What sort of activity they are taking part in Facebook etc.
One thing that seemed quite interesting to me is the fact they considered the mental health of individual while using Facebook to make any sort of judgement. To me, it felt like, the importance of mental health in these cases is quite a new concept rather than being 10 years old. One thing that was pretty amusing to me was the part, “We also found an interaction between bridging social capital and subjective well-being measures. For less intense Facebook users, students who reported low satisfaction with MSU life also reported having much lower bridging social capital than those who used Facebook more intensely. The same was true for self-esteem. Conversely, there was little difference in bridging social capital among those who reported high satisfaction with life at MSU and high self-esteem relative to Facebook use intensity. One explanation consistent with these interaction effects is that Facebook use may be helping to overcome barriers faced by students who have low satisfaction and low self-esteem. Because bridging social capital provides benefits such as increased information and opportunities, we suspect that participants who use Facebook in this way are able to get more out of their college experience.” When I was going through that part of the paper, it reminded me of my time in Facebook back in 2009. I started using it mostly to find people with whom I share similar interest. Talking to such people definitely helped me out during my school days. I felt less alone because I had people who liked the same thing as I did, and I didn’t feel as left out as I felt in my school. So the paper definitely hits home for me.
Despite the fact the study being conducted on MSU only, it didn’t seem that different from current times. But one of the only difference I noticed is probably the fact that, these days Facebook is more detrimental than being useful as stated in the paper. That itself isn’t Facebook’s fault, but the way people are using it. In current times we noticed that people’s self-esteem being lowered due to Facebook usage, when people see other people having a “better life”, they start feeling bad for their own life. Other than that, even now people mostly use Facebook to keep contact with their old friends and acquaintances. But people ARE using Facebook to know new people, but I think that became possible because when the paper conducted the study, Facebook was bound by the academic email, but now it’s more global than ever.
P.S: I wonder if “Blacksburg Electronic Village” refers to our Blacksbrug.
