Facebook, Scholar Studies and Weak Ties
Every day, a lot of people go on Facebook to read not only their friends’ news feed but also their friends’ friends’ recent activities on the Facebook. By analyzing tastes, personality, and relationships of the person, Facebook suggests new friends, movies, or pages of a promotion. Facebook has 58 million active users and it is ranked 6th of most trafficked web site in United States, which is the reason the website is used most frequently for many scholar researches. Especially, Facebook is a perfect sample for sociology, psychology and political science studies because it provides how young people socialize with others and how their relationships are formed. However, most of people on Facebook do not know that they were part of studies which creates privacy issues.
S. Shyam Sundar, a professor and founder of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State, said that people who have more than 800 friends are considered having too many friends are insecure. I think this can make sense in a way that people with too many friends on Facebook, have way too many ties connecting them with others so that there will be many weak ties that can make them insecure. Also people who use Facebook intensively are more likely to form many weak ties, which can provide new perspectives and opportunities that cannot be obtained from string ties. So Facebook is a tool that can provide weak ties which cannot be easily created from the off line society.
On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/college/coll17facebook.html?pagewanted=print&_r=0