Cameron Marlow and the Facebook Data Team shed some more light on the Facebook network maintenance findings reported in the Economist (read danah boyd’s take):
We were asked a simple question: is Facebook increasing the size of people’s personal networks? This is a particularly difficult question to answer, so as a first attempt we looked into the types of relationships people do maintain, and the relative size of these groups. The image above presents a high-level overview of our findings: while the average Facebook user communicates with a small subset of their entire friend network, they maintain relationships with a group two times the size of this core. This not only affects each user, but also has systemic effects that may explain why things spread so quickly on Facebook.
The post has great visuals, including the following:
This graphic explores the communication behavior of an individual with a network of n size. An average person with 500 friends maintains mutual Facebook communication with 10 (if male) or 16 (if female) individuals. There’s very limited generalizability in this data (we mediate our relationships through a number of heterogenous technologies), I see a striking parallel to some previous research. Employing similar system-level data, Ling and Yttri (2006) explored the communication patterns of mobile phone users. Someone age 20-24 may keep 105 names in their registry, but they call only 22 of them monthly, 7 weekly, and 3 daily. The technology mediates access, but it doesn’t change the norm.
The larger point Marlow makes regards one-way communication, i.e those you surveil through the news feed or profile views. This behavior is pre-digital, but social networks afford us surveillance unlike any technology prior. If our cell phones dailed people at random and suggested we chat with them, we wouldn’t think of that as a feature. The multiplexity of a social network’s communication space allows just that functionality, with lower social cost. The social impacts of this affordance are valid area for study, but to get answers we’ll have to move past large-scale data and into subjective methods.
Of course, any time we posit large social change as a result of technology, our expectations often fall short of reality. Just as the telegraph didn’t end war, Facebook isn’t going to reinvent friendship (lower-case f). The lack of a grandiose main effect doesn’t take away from the importance, and I look forward to the work the Facebook Data Team does exploring this interesting area.
Ling, R. and Yttri, B. (2006). Control, Emancipation and Status: The Mobile Telephone in the Teen’s Parental and Peer Group Control Relationships. In Kruat, R., Brynin, M., and Kiesler, S. (Eds.), Computers, Phones and the Internet: Domesticating Information Technology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
