The purpose of Facebook: The value of Facebook friends in increasing self-perceived popularity

A survey of 407 students was conducted at a medium-sized Midwestern university to examine what motivates college students to have friends on Facebook. The goal of the study was to see if people interact with more Facebook friends than they do offline friends on a regular basis and to see if the primary reason students become friends with others on Facebook is to increase their popularity. The results suggest that students do not become Facebook friends with others to increase their popularity, which is in contrast to previous research. Results were inconclusive in determining if people regularly interact with more Facebook friends than they do offline friends. Purpose of Facebook 3 INTRODUCTION A social networking site (SNS) is defined as a “web-based system that allows individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system” (Boyd & Ellison, 2007, p.2). Facebook is a social networking website where people can create an online profile with information about themselves, and its popularity has increased dramatically since its creation in 2004. An estimated 93% of college students have a Facebook account (Sheldon, 2008). Facebook had 200 million unique visitors to its website between January and November of 2008, and it follows Blogger as the second most visited SNS (Schonfeld, 2008). Facebook CEO Mark Zuckenburg first made Facebook available on February 4, 2004 to fellow Harvard students. It was designed to be a digital version of Harvard’s physical class directories that have a photograph of each student with some identifying facts. Facebook continued to expand to include other universities, and in 2006, Facebook changed its membership requirements so that anyone who is thirteen years or older can join the website if he or she has a valid email address. Facebook users create their own profile where they can post information about themselves: contact information, hobbies, interests, and pictures. They can also view the profiles of others in their network. Members of a network may live in the same geographic area, attend the same school, or may be members of the same organization. Users can become friends with people they know in their same network or in other networks. Once two people have become “Facebook friends,” they may post messages on each other’s profiles for public viewing and share pictures and videos. Users can also join interest Purpose of Facebook 4 groups, use applications that have entertainment and social purposes, and invite their friends to attend events. When looking at the functionality Facebook offers, Stern and Taylor (2007) found that college students indicated these were their primary uses of Facebook: • Common Uses-Used Several Times Per Day or Week o Sending messages to friends o Viewing photos o Keeping in touch with old friends o Making plans o Checking out people to learn more about them o Entertainment o Procrastination • Somewhat Frequent UsesOnce a Week to Once A Month o Asking other students course-related questions o Tracking people to see what they are doing o Posting photos to their Facebook profile • Not Utilized-Never Utilized o Meeting new romantic partners o Online dating o Advertising social and academic events o Recruiting for social clubs and organizations o Avoiding socially uncomfortable situations Facebook, SNS, and other forms of electronic communication (e.g. instant messaging, text messaging, email) play a significant role in the lives of college and high school students. Current technology allows students to be more connected to each other, even through time and geographic barriers, more than any other generation in history. For these reasons Facebook and other SNS have been researched to see how they influence college and high school students’ social skills and social interactions. The technological capabilities of Facebook have made it easy for users to connect to other people on Facebook. Users can search for people they know or browse for people with their similar interests and become friends with them at a click of a button. These electronic friendships can be called forward at any time and can remain dormant (even for years) until one Purpose of Facebook 5 friend decides he or she wants to interact with the other. Facebook is free to users. This means that it does not cost users anything to keep these dormant relationships, and the ease of recalling these friendships makes maintaining them easy. This may explain why students report having a higher number of friends, 150-200 (Ellison, Stienfield, & Lampe, 2007), or 200-350 (Sheldon 2008) on Facebook than users may be expected to report if they were to report their number of offline friends. Time and resource constraints help make a reasonable assumption that a person cannot interact with all of these friends on a regular basis. The fact that Facebook friendships can remain dormant for years means that two Facebook friends may never interact after agreeing to be friends. If Facebook users have a significant number of friends, and it is unlikely that they can interact with all of them, then why do Facebook users have so many Facebook friends? The ability for Facebook users to see how many friends a person has on Facebook may answer this question. Facebook users know that their friend count increases with every friend they add or accept. Many of us can recall stories of talking to children where popularity was described by discussing the number of friends they had. The first students to have Facebook tried to obtain as many friends as possible (Cassidy, 2006). This evidence, along with my own anecdotal evidence of having several people befriend me after meeting me on one or two occasions, has led me to suspect that Facebook users knowingly add or accept friends they know they will not interact with as a way to increase their perceived popularity. In order to examine these issues this paper includes a review of literature on some different proposed motives a college student may have for using Facebook, as well as a review of literature on the similarities and differences between a traditional friend in an offline context and a Facebook friend. Next will be a summary of the measures used, the hypotheses, research Purpose of Facebook 6 methods, and results. The paper will conclude with a discussion of the results, the limitations of the study, and directions for future research. The conclusions drawn will give insight into whether or not Facebook users interact with more friends on Facebook than they do in an offline context, and it will determine if users have Facebook friends to increase their popularity. MOTIVES OF FACEBOOK USAGE The primary purpose of a SNS such as Facebook is to allow users to interact with other members. Interaction can take many forms. Users can communicate with each other, play games, blog their feelings on a particular issue, or invite other users to a party or event. Research has been done to see what motivates people to use Facebook for these reasons and how it affects the friendships an individual has with other Facebook users. The five motives of Facebook usage that have been identified are self-promotion and narcissism (e.g., Cassidy, 2006; Twenge, 2006; Buffardi & Campbell, 2008), entertainment (Facebook, 2008), social capital (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007), a poor offline social network (Ross, Orr, Sisic, Arseneault, Simmering, & Orr, 2008; Sheldon, 2008), and popularity (Zywica & Danowski, 2008; Tong, Van Der Heide, Langwell, & Walther, 2008). In a review of the literature on why people use Facebook, these five motives were the most recurring. Previous research on each of the five identified motives of Facebook usage is now presented in the following sections. Self-Promotion and Narcissism Duncan Watts, a sociologist at Columbia, said there is a dramatic shift in the way young people see the Internet (Cassidy, 2006). He stated younger Internet users are accustomed to being connected by the Internet, and they no longer find the concept interesting. Watts felt that Facebook is more about voyeurism and exhibitionism because people like to express themselves (Cassidy, 2006). Calvert (2000) also felt that Facebook supports voyeurism and exhibitionism Purpose of Facebook 7 among its users, but other research has shown that Facebook is used more for voyeurism than it is for exhibitionism (Bumgarner, 2007). Facebook’s use as a tool for exhibition may appeal to people with high amounts of narcissism. Jean Twenge (2006) thought that younger Americans are currently using SNS more because they are narcissistic. She stated that the main users of SNS are in their mid-teens to age thirty-five. The Baby Boomers taught this group, named “Generation Me”, to be individualistic and encouraged them to develop their self-esteem. Twenge explained this is why narcissism has risen in America since the 1950’s, as shown by the fact that this group has scored consistently higher on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) than older Americans. Rosen (2007) stated that we must also remember the context of the situation. Before the creation of SNS, high class citizens had used painted portraits for centuries to display their importance and power. SNS, therefore, could be a technological version of the painted portrait with technology allowing these portraits to be created by and accessed by more people (Rosen, 2007). Buffardi and Campbell’s (2008) research investigated the role that narcissism plays in social networking sites. Narcissism is linked to higher levels of social activity in social networking sites because it allows Facebook users to share an affiliation with someone they have interacted little with. Narcissists like to be in control, and SNS allow these users to control how they present themsel