Why do we still use Facebook?
I realize that I’ve been using Facebook ever since 7th grade! That’s a really long time. I’ve been using Facebook the same way, yet I never get tired of it. Curious, I found an article titled – “Why are we still on Facebook?”. The author, Maria, discusses factors that keep us on Facebook. One major factor to keep on using Facebook is “the desire to keep in touch with friends.” – Facebook helps maintain the social connections with people who you often see, or don’t often see. You can also easily find people that you used to be friends with, and recover the dying social ties. The class principles of weak ties, strong ties, and triadic closure can be easily applied to social ties on Facebook – strong ties are strengthened and easily maintained on Facebook while weak ties of unfamiliar friends and mutual friends will introduce new relationships and information. Another interesting factor is the “desire to broadcast the nature of these bonds.” We enjoy publicly displaying our friendships through posting on friends’ profile walls and uploading pictures. This major interaction on the social network satisfies a primitive desire and social need.
I often wondered why and how social ties are created, maintained, strengthened or weakened. These interactions are not just drawing edges between blobs on a chart, but show how our behavior and primitive desires manifest in our social interactions. And today’s technology and online platforms inflate these behaviors at a faster level, introducing unique patterns of how we act on social media today.
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-are-we-still-on-facebook