In mid-January, the Facebook Data Team took a moment to reflect on social networking. Rightly so, they noted, “Social networking technologies like Facebook let us connect to hundreds, even thousands of people — and have fundamentally changed how people get their information.”
In order to better understand how we use the social network that is Facebook, several members of the Facebook Team conducted a study in 2010. Contrary to those who claim that Facebook is an echo chamber (in other words, those who claim people only consume and share information with likeminded close friends), they found that the vast majority of information comes from contacts people interact with infrequently.
To contextualize their findings, Facebook turned to the well-known work of Mark Granovetter.
Economic sociologist Mark Granovetter was one of the first to popularize the use of social networks in understanding the spread of information. In his seminal 1973 paper, The Strength of Weak Ties, Granovetter found that surprisingly, people are more likely to acquire jobs that they learned about through individuals they interact with infrequently rather than their close personal contacts.
Similarly, the Facebook Team found that information shared by a person’s weak ties had a greater potential to expose their friends to information they would not have otherwise discovered. Ultimately, they concluded that weak ties are driving information on Facebook. To read more about how they reached this conclusion, check out the article “Rethinking Information Diversity in Networks” on the Facebook Data Team’s page.
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Touché, Facebook Team » Citings and Sightings | Infos Press — February 9, 2012
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Steve — February 10, 2012
This doesn't make any sense, as it imports categories from studies of networks in "real life" straight into virtual life. My facebook friends fall into a number of categories--(1) close friends who are currently part of my everyday life; (2) people I was once close friends with; (3) acquaintances from the past and present; (4) "famous people", at least in my world, i.e. people I've heard of even though I've never met them; (5) people I've never met who I'm friends with on fb because I liked their comments somewhere, or they liked mine. The core of my facebook friends includes mostly people in categories 2, 3, 4 and 5, although I rarely interact face to face with most of them, and some I have never met in person. We form something of an echo chamber, in that we share news of the world and debate politics over what would seem like a very narrow patch to outsiders. At the same time, I get a great deal of information I would not otherwise get. This form of communication is very important to me, but it isn't inherently more diverse than the views I hear in category 1, usually in "real life."