Potato Chipping

Learning to Like Facebook

My thesis, Learning to Like Facebook? Effects of Cultural and Educational Capital on the Use of Social Network Sites in a Population of University Students, is now available for download.

Abstract: This study explores the reasons why university students prefer to join or participate frequently in one social network website (SNS) over another. Drawing from previous research into motivations and environmental factors influencing SNS behavior, a theoretical model of SNS selection and frequency of use is constructed and evaluated. Random sampling methods are used to generate a population of students from a midwestern, urban, public university with an enrollment of nearly 16,000. Subjects responded to a questionnaire soliciting information regarding personal characteristics and SNS behaviors, and additional data was extracted from a content analysis of SNS profiles. The results show that attachment, age, and educational capital are the primary factors associated with SNS preference, while the effect of cultural capital is minimal. Limitations and implications are discussed.

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“I’m Well-Adjusted.” “No, I’m Well-Adjusted.”

David Gibson at the Complexity and Social Networks Blog hypothesizes about Facebook and (anti) social capital:

I predict that we will eventually want to add something that I am tempted to call anti-social capital, which is a snarky (and imprecise) term for the absence of ties of a certain type, namely those whose main consequence is that you spend a lot of time online communicating with people who, like you, have a lot of time to spend socializing online. It’s not hard to foresee why someone without such connections would fare better at school, in the workplace, and in their family relations than someone with them, other things being equal.

In fact, most studies so far–see Ellison et al. (2007), Steinfield et al. (2008), and Valenzuela et al. (2008)–have reached the opposite conclusion: that Facebook users have higher social capital than non-users, among several other beneficial social and psychological characteristics (e.g., life satisfaction). Tufekci (2008) found a major difference between users and non-users was their attitudes toward social grooming: users enjoyed those types of interactions or at least accepted their usefulness, while non-user attitudes “[ranged] from incredulous to hostile.”

There have, of course, been studies finding negative social or psychological characteristics associated with SNS use, particularly narcissism (e.g., Buffardi & Campbell 2008). But these negative findings, if true, are not incompatible with the positive findings of social capital (I don’t know about you, but socially competent narcissists abound in my circle of acquaintances).

My quibble with Gibson’s formulation is his premise that “you spend a lot of time online communicating with people who, like you, have a lot of time to spend socializing online.” We all spend an obscene amount of time engaging in technologically-mediated interactions (8.5 hours per day, according to this recent study), regardless of age. If we don’t have time for those activities, we make time, and if we don’t spend a lot of time online, it’s because we’re staring at a different screen.

My question is, if we all spend hours each day staring at our screens, what type of screens will those with high social capital prefer? Those that provide the most interactive potential, like cell phone and computer screens. Meanwhile, those with low social capital will eschew SNSs, use their computers for non-interactive ends, or prefer other mediated activities that require no direct interaction (e.g., watching television).

Tufekci’s research supports this perspective, as he found that there was no difference in the amount of time spent on the Internet between SNS users and non-users, but the ways in which they used the Internet varied significantly. Both groups were users of the “instrumental” Internet, performing practical non-interactive tasks such as shopping or research, but only SNS users participated heavily in the “expressive” Internet, which includes e-mailing, instant messaging, blogging, and reading others’ blogs. SNSs are just one of the ways that people with high social capital leverage our gizmos to interact with others.

That’s why I find it kind of silly when people prophecy that technologically-mediated interaction means the death of the face-to-face interaction. The people who spend the most time interacting with others via screens are also the ones who spend the most time talking your ear off in person. As long as we keep being in each other’s physical presence, those with high social capital will keep talking–to our face and through screens–while those with low social capital won’t.

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Be Afraid. Read Our News.

MySpace: 90,000 Sex Offenders Removed from Site

When I think of the attitudinal outlook driving moral panics, I think of my experience working as a technology assistant at a one-to-one laptop high school at the height of the MySpace/Facebook sexual predator panic from 2004-2006.

The school organized a series of informational sessions for parents, emceed by the school’s tech coordinator. As a barely-drinking-age, MySpace-and-Facebook-using employee of the school, my job was to de-mystify these sites by demonstrating what these sites do and describing what teens get out of them. My presentation was followed by that of a police officer from a neighboring community who specialized in digital crime, whose role was ostensibly to describe the dangers and provide tips to parents seeking to keep their kids safe.

It was a recipe for disaster. A mere college student cognizant of the dangers but sympathetic to the innumerable teens who use these sites safely didn’t stand a chance against an authoritative cop telling lurid tales of sexual abuse cases and making no secret of his distaste for these sites. Without fail, the Q&A sessions devolved into public witch hunts in which I was expected to defend the entire population of social network site users and explain why parents shouldn’t forbid their children from any and all online interactions.

One interaction sticks out prominently in my mind. An outspoken Luddite father attended one of these sessions and launched into a diatribe in which he all but accused me of abetting sexual predators in their quest to rape his daughter. I began my response by noting that he had grossly mischaracterized my beliefs about the dangers of social network sites.

“What do you believe?” he challenged.

“I believe that most parents overreact, and most teens underreact.” The audience responded with audible murmurs of approval.

His face contorted in disgust. “I don’t know how you can overreact to the things you hear in the news,” he snarled.

I try to make a point not to ascribe to simplistic grand theories of social behavior. But it’s hard for me not to interpret the articles written in the wake of this finding as a basic lesson in the populist theory of media bias.

The appeal of the article is entirely dependent upon the preexisting panic parents feel about strange Internet practices and the inability of most consumers to accurately assess scale. We know hundreds, or at best a few thousands of people over the course of our lives. In that context, a football stadium full of sexual predators is downright menacing.

But in the context of the 76 million unique visitors to MySpace in the U.S., this accounts for a whopping rate of a little of one in a thousand: 0.118%.

No one in their right mind would dispute that some teens are ignorant of the dangers of socializing with strangers on the Internet. Nor that one incident of sexual predation is already one too many. But only two types of reporter would broadcast a 0.1% incidence of deviant behavior as a significant finding: (1) one who is as ignorant as the masses that (s)he seeks to inform, or (2) one who knowingly understands that his or her audience would be awed by the raw figure of 90,000 deviants in a scary context.

“What’s this world coming to?”

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Carlin and Marx

Teaching a class on Marx tomorrow, wishing I could show this video (skip ahead to about 1:20).

A great Marxist rant, from class struggles all the way to false consciousness. Too bad that typical Carlin profanity and patriotic irreverence makes it inappropriate for classroom use…

[Edit: I showed it to them anyway. Got some good discussion out of it too.]

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Carrying Your Culture

Last night, with eyes sagging and sinuses hanging out of my nose, I nevertheless spent hours customizing a new iPhone.

Tools like that fascinate me, and not just because I can play Katamari on them. It’s clear that our society’s most beloved toys are progressing toward holding more and more data, as quickly as hardware capacity and organizational software will allow. The course of this progression reveals much about how we define ourselves as social beings.

We would expect personal data and modes of interpersonal communication to figure prominently in these devices. What surprises me is how much of what we consider personal data is actually our cultural consumptive preferences. Besides demographics, nearly every social network profile asks for your favorite books, music, TV shows, movies. Computers, the iPod/iPhone, TiVo (“It’s your life, simplified!”), Amazon Kindle: all of these devices are valued for their ability to store our cultural products.

To put cultural consumption on par with other identifying features, like demographic traits or social roles or friends and family, is pretty ambitious. Clearly, many of us see something significant in the cultural products we choose to consume. We announce these choices (or lie about them) in social network profiles, our public face to the digital world, and relentlessly snatch up any device that stores these choices in greater quantities with greater efficiency. We use them to create a cultural constellation that broadcasts a requisite conformity coupled with a minimal and nonthreatening amount of individuality, a harmonious image of “me” through products that are functionally complementary yet symbolically similar.

And these taste preferences, in turn, illuminate the demographic traits and social roles also revealed in our profiles, and which are usually the first things that most people learn about us. Many of those traits and roles are ascribed or privy to inaccurate or demeaning stereotypes, but we can counter them by presenting our cultural constellation to demonstrate our complexity. Conversely, if we’re proud of one or more of our traits or roles, we can reinforce them by presenting cultural products resonant with those characteristics.

These cultural choices are not “us” per se, but they are the most conspicuous things that are “ours.” Unlike other information contained in profiles, we have complete control over them at all times. They are the subjective elements that interact with the objective traits and roles to create a more accurate (or inaccurate) picture of “us” to others. We prize these preferences because even if they are not as revelatory as something more central to our identity–such as our deepest fears or dreams–the juxtaposition of just a few of them generates a diverse, easily understood metaphor for the norms and values most important to us. Thanks to the ubiquity of data storage and the social network template, the makeup of our cultural consumption is a simple language with considerable flexibility that we all speak.

It’ll be interesting to see what kind of identity gadgets are created in the near future. Moore’s Law will keep chugging for at least another 10-20 years, and the software to manage all of that hardware will surely follow, so the connectivity of a Facebook or cell phone will continue to converge with the storage of a TiVo or Kindle. With a few more orders of magnitude, we’ll be able to carry our entire library of cultural consumption in our pockets (whether the RIAA likes it or not). I wonder how simplified we’ll feel our lives are then?

[Edit: From a discussion about generational identities on Grant McCracken's blog: "For my peer group, identity is constructed around personal taste (art+music+film/use of recreational time), professional (or non-professional) employment, kinds of education, and what each of us wants to accomplish in our short time here. "

Original post here and discussion here.]

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Clearly…

I need to learn how to function at a level that includes time for blogging.

But my time away was certainly productive. A partial list:

• Applied/am applying to half a dozen sociology Ph.D. programs around the country, which will remain nameless until such time as I’m able to write a gloating/despondent post about how my future has been arbitrarily decided by a smattering of committees.

• Collected data for my thesis. Going well so far. I’m now in the process of organizing and decoding everything. And then. The Writing.

• Got hired to teach a summer class at my current institution after I graduate: Sociology of Deviant Behavior. I’m very excited about this–this will be my first class at the university level in which I’m the primary instructor. Any lurkers with experience/suggestions? (Any lurkers at all?)

• Conducted a neat little ethnographic study of behaviors in academic libraries. I can’t publish it, because of an agreement with the human subjects committee, but it made a nifty writing sample to those Ph.D. programs who lean qualitative. The basic research question was, “If technology has rendered the library’s function as a central location of information obsolete, why do people still go there?” and my basic answer was, “To insulate themselves from that same ubiquitous technology, which is perceived as a threat to their productivity.” Fun exercise, except for the endless note-taking.

• Decided to get a certificate in university teaching, which I didn’t even know was offered until the beginning of this semester. This led to me taking an educational psychology class and attending an array of workshops and conferences. Next semester I have to keep a weekly response log and get observed as I do my TA thing. If you say so…

Anyways, I’ll likely be around a bit more, as I’m on break for another month and then ABT + TA next semester. I already have a few ideas that I’m looking to delve into during the next few weeks…

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Facebook Tastes

This uproar and boycott over the new Facebook is pretty interesting in the context of my thesis.

One of the major differences between Facebook and MySpace is its design, layout, and overall aesthetic. As danah boyd colorfully notes, MySpace is ridden with “flashy…Las Vegas imagery,” while Facebook is akin to a “poshy Scandinavian design house.”

The connection between taste preferences and socioeconomic status has been explored by Thorstein Veblen, Herbert Gans, Pierre Bourdieu, and others. SES becomes an identity which must be displayed by distinctive consumption, whether of material products (food, clothes, etc.) or cultural products (music, movies, etc.). This correlation between taste and SES is one of the reasons boyd suggests that MySpace and Facebook are reflecting class divisions.

One of Facebook’s reasons for redesigning its website was to regain the ascetic Facebook aesthetic, after the addition of applications made profiles significantly more cluttered (i.e., more like MySpace):

Among Facebook’s goals with the new design were to reduce the clutter of members’ profile pages and restore the social network’s clean and organized layout.

At first, I thought that the majority of complaints about the new design would come from Facebook users who prefer a MySpace aesthetic. But the article above points out that the redesign does incorporate at least one element that clashes with the Facebook aesthetic:

Fishbein, like many redesign critics, dislikes the new tabbed interface because she feels it forces people to do too much clicking around to see and find things. She preferred the more consolidated look and feel of the old design. She also finds the overall effect of the new design to be “very in-your-face,” whereas the previous layout was, in her view, less strident and more discreet.

Though my proposal has already been approved by the human subjects committee, I’m going to try to get approval for a new question asking Facebook users to rate their opinion of the new Facebook on a Likert scale. It’ll be interesting to see, when I begin collecting data during the next couple of weeks, if there’s a correlation between socioeconomic origin and opinion of the new Facebook’s design.

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Disappeared for a while there…

But for good reason. The community violence project from the spring has been prepared and submitted for publication. I’ve also completed a review of the findings and methodological problems regarding the social adjustment of gifted youths that I’ll be refining and submitting shortly.

This fall, I’ll be taking a methods class and an educational psychology class, along with the usual TA load. But the main projects will be applying to PhD programs and beginning my thesis. IRB is in just two weeks…

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xkcd Redux

So apparently, xkcd doesn’t consider sociology to be the bottom of the barrel. That spot is reserved for literary criticism.

I’m not entirely sure how the sociologically uninitiated might be able to last four minutes without his or her lack of training exposed. I can think of a number of slips that would be an instant betrayal.

“I agree with Parsons that…”

“Blind reviewers are freaking awesome.”

“What does Karl Marx have to do with sociology?”

“My department and I are totally not having any funding problems at all whatsoever.”

Or, my personal favorite:

“I disagree with your macro-level social structural theory. Because, you see, my wife’s friend’s boss…”

(You know how in movies, the villain will sometimes have a button he can push that will open up a trap door, so a misguided opponent or truant subordinate can fall to his or her death? When I’m a professor, I’d like to have trap doors beneath every student’s desk. And a red button marked “Ecological Fallacy.” So as soon as a student attempts to refute a sociological argument based on an individual personal experience, I can push the button and make the student fall into a pool of sharks with lasers attached to their heads. I defy anyone to explain how this would not produce positive educational change.)

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Powerful

I know. Ethnographies are hard. And I don’t mean to diminish any of the dozens of provocative behaviors and insights C.J. Pascoe presents in Dude, You’re A Fag, indisputably the best book I’ve read so far this summer. But I have to admit, because of some of her methodological choices, I felt it was somewhat lacking because it could’ve been much more complete.

She chose to employ a research design (participant observation) best suited for a micro-level interactionist perspective, while primarily employing a macro-level conflict perspective. This tension forces her into the untenable position of repeatedly asserting that River High is representative of the American high school, because of its demographic similarity to the country as a whole (an ecologically flawed premise) and presence of supposedly archetypal characteristics (e.g., school pride).

I thought she did a great job when she combined interactionism with feminism, as she did with Ricky (the most openly homosexual boy in the school) and the girls who challenge traditional gender roles. I don’t understand why she didn’t apply the same method with her other subjects. In these case studies, she uncovers important contexts like family origins, relational dynamics, and individual normative outlooks and ties them to the larger environment of the school, whereas the teachers, the traditionally feminine girls, and the hegemonic boys aren’t treated with the same depth.

She describes how the teachers and administrators ignore or tacitly encourage sexist behaviors, but doesn’t dig into why Ms. Mac acts the way she does. She describes how Cathy allows her body to be tossed around, but when she asks her why, Cathy gives a vague, dismissive answer (“That’s just what we do”) that should’ve been probed but instead is left at face value. She describes how many of the boys fall into the misogynistic, fag-epithet dynamic in public, but talk touchingly about their girlfriends in private. Yet she doesn’t attempt to uncover how they’re able to reconcile this apparent contradiction.

I also thought her treatment of power was incomplete. There’s a whole body of literature that investigates how men or boys assert power as a consequence of feeling powerless: e.g., Fine et al.’s “(In)secure Times” [pdf]. Though Pascoe does a great job describing how the boys assert power, she doesn’t look at all into whether or not they actually feel powerful. This one-sided approach, I thought, led her into some deficient conclusions.

For example, she discusses a subpopulation of boys who reject the hegemonic mistreatment of women because of their strong religious beliefs, and suggests that they are “drawing on masculinizing discourses of self-control and maturity [which] like practices of compulsive heterosexuality [indicate] control and mastery, not over others (girls), but over themselves” (112). Both the fact that these boys have been socialized into treating women poorly and have no choice to subdue their habitual sexism but by exerting control over themselves, and the fact that they simultaneously feel so powerless in the face of their temptation to sexualize women that they must rely on a higher power, are ignored.

I also question how, although she observed many different environments within the school, it seems that a disproportionate number of her examples come from the weight room and shop class, two settings composed of male actors that I doubt anyone would consider representative. We’re on a first-name basis with Josh, Pedro, and many others who adhere to the most conspicuously oppressive model of masculinity, yet the rare boy who challenges it publicly (“I got a girlfriend, man. I wouldn’t do that to her,” 110) is left nameless. Why doesn’t he merit the scrutiny that the basketball and GSA girls receive? What do the large number of unremarkable River boys who quietly go about their day think about masculinity? We don’t know.

I enjoyed the read, and I thought she did an excellent job with what she did choose to cover. But I was disappointed that she didn’t follow up on some interesting developments that probably would have led to some compelling findings.

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