As I’ve said before, whether or not this is a deliberate strategy on their part, Facebook alters the site’s architecture every couple of months. The link below provides an early release of what the next changes might look like – but what the improvement is supposed to be, I haven’t a notion.
More Facebook Design Changes Being Tested [PIC]
This is a little bit worrying for Facebook. I’ve always been fascinated by how fast people reply to Facebook’s own posts, so when I was reading the Facebook Links page about an hour ago I saw that within 10 minutes there had already been 147 comments to a link to their new Privacy page.
However, I noticed that very few of these had any real connection to the link. Bear in mind also that what piqued my interest was that these were comments on the links page, not the privacy page itself. So, being the good empirical research cyberpsychologist that I am, I did a bit of copy-and-pasting, finding-and-replacing, text-to-table, word-to-excel, ran a few formulae, inserted a chart, took a screenshot and the result is above.
To explain:
Invitations to Facebook pages or groups: fairly self-explanatory, but no real connection to the link
Phrases of low significance: things like ‘ok’, ‘hmmmm’, ‘add me’ – that type of thing
Comments on the post, or Facebook generally: actual complaints or commendations about the link, or other features of Facebook, chat being mentioned a lot
Numbers (e.g. ‘1st!’, including ironic): Including ‘4th’ at number 81
Links to external sites: surprisingly few, but the majority of which were related to something called a ‘Justin Bieber’
Chain letters: A few old-fashioned ‘pass this on to ten people or you won’t find true love’ type messages which are completely true.
So what does all this mean? Well, in this particular case, Facebook generated a large amount of internal traffic, less than a quarter of which was meaningful.
Do you think this figure can be generalised across Facebook’s entire network? How much of Facebook is simply noise?
My professional judgment is that Facebook, like any other ‘technology of the self’ (Foucault, 1984) is morally neutral. Hence it can be used for good, as well as not-so-good purposes. Today I’ve listed three stories that illustrate the positive power of social media – none of which I’ve taken from Facebook’s blog, mind you.
Firstly this article shows how the U.S. government is using Facebook to engage people all across the world with its diplomatic representations in various countries. It’s a simple and effective way to attempt to change opinions
How the U.S. Engages the World With Social Media
Secondly, an example of how a major corporation can change its tune following a Facebook campaign.
Nestle Meets Greenpeace’s Demands Following Social Media Backlash
And finally, and most importantly, evidence that social media is changing the political landscape. This is a point that is often forgotten in the hysteria: Facebook gets young people engaged with the political process much more than traditional media.
Social Media is Slowly Changing the Demographics of Political Engagement
Reference
Foucault, M. (1984). The history of sexuality, vol. III – The care of the self. (R. Hurley, Trans.). London: Allen Lane, Penguin.
Responding to recent controversy about Facebook and ‘addiction’, cyberpsychologist Dr Ciarán Mc Mahon brings expert opinion to the debate by explaining how Facebook has become so popular, and suggesting how users can better manage their use of the site.
In this video release, he breaks down the appeal into 7 key design elements, relating each of them to well-established psychological research findings and concepts: namely, scarcity principle, normative social influence, preference for novelty, diminishing returns & negative automaintenance, variable ratio reinforcement schedule, hyperpersonal communication and flow.
In addition, he proposes strategies that he recommends users adopt so as to better manage their use of the site, including:
Episode 2, Part 1a – Principles 1, 2 & 3
Episode 2, Part 1b – Principles 4, 5, 6 & 7
Episode 2, Part 2 – Strategies