Facebook from sociological perspective

Part 1

Networking is a skill you need to have

Studies show that between any two people in the world there are no more than six intermediaries. This means that it takes no more than 6 people to go directly to Bill Gates, Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama or the emperor of Japan.

Src. Wikipedia.org

Effective networking is an extremely valuable resource. Rising awareness of how much can be gained by being involved in this global network makes us inviting more and more people to our social network on Facebook. People aware of its importance are collecting contacts to develop their own field of connections allowing them to share interests, insights and also benefit in professional work.

Src. Wikipedia.org

The larger and richer the network, the easier it is to implement these six phones and talk to the richest man on Earth. The development of social networking sites confirms these observations , just look at the example of Facebook . The Internet has become a field of creating relations, which can often begin in it, not in a direct face to face-to-face contact. Facebook allows us to develop relationships, both informal and business.

Src. facebook.com

Facebook is an online social network within which registered users can create networks and groups, share photos, messages and play games. Currently it has more than 500 million users worldwide, and the monthly upload of more than 1 billion photos and 10 million movies. The project was launched on Feb. 4, 2004 in Cambridge (Massachusetts) and was originally intended primarily for high school and college students. Its lead author is Mark Zuckerberg (he currently serves as the CEO). The service employs about 1,000 workers.

Src. Assosieted Press

Facebook helps to sty in touch and develop relationships, both social and business. In instant makes possible to organize a big meeting at the other end of Europe through the exchange of several messages. Network of contacts gives you the possibility of obtaining discounts on all expenditures related to the meeting. In most of today's businesses and organizations, contacts decide everything. They help to find customers more quickly, contribute to the possibility of making interesting projects and much greater access to valuable information. All these things are important, but the greatest gift which an extensive network of good contacts brings is it the absolute safety and great flexibility. Effective networking brings security, because it removes dependency on one person - the contractor, supplier, subcontractor, or informant. In the event that something goes wrong - ill subcontractor, the customer had an accident, and the supplier was offended – you just email other people by the social networking sites. Dependance from suppliers and subcontractors disappears. However, before that happens, it is necessary to build a proper network of contacts.

Part 2

Network Society

http://senseable.mit.edu/nyte/visuals.html

Manuel Castells in “The Rise of the Network Society” describes the network society as one of the types of society, which in essence is a network of social relationships and access to participate in various organizations and social groups and circles of interest by an individual. Network society can not be described as an entirely new form of cultural and civilization, because to a large extent based on the capitalist social and economic relations. In his opinion in this way does not acquire the information society nor the utopian nature of technocratic. The existing social divisions are organized around a new central value - of information, not money”. Castells's vision can be related to the facebook site, because this service is freely available to all Internet users, it gives equal access to its resources each person using it.

Max Webber classic sociologist abut 150 years ago pointed tree most socially important values: prestige, power, money. Modern criteria for prestige and power are usually connected with a professional position and income, not the family heritage. Usually we don't have access to ones bank account to know how much ones earns, we connect a persons lifestyle to his prestige and power. In proposing this type of community research sites it is worth noting what features are used by most users and can be crucial to determine their social status. Viewing the page of each profile on Facebook in the upper left corner there is a profile photo, which also is present in all user posts. People carefully select a photo of themselves that will create the best fitting image of them in the community portal. There are photographs from everyday life and holiday events. We can see not only to the user profile holder but also his friends and the place where he lives. Therefore, in most cases, you can discover the wealthiness of the user, whether by clothes he wears or the photograph background can show an exotic beach or other desirable location like golf court. The photo can indicate presage, someone can publish a photo in which he receives a prize or is surrounded by well-known or important people. When we see the user in a good car or a well-furnished apartment, we can make assumptions about the status of ownership. Photos of the same people on other than professional services such as linkedin.com or goldenline.pl are often different from those on facebook. We could think that there is a clear division of formal and informal relationships on social networking sites, but taking into account the number o companies and institutions present on the facebook, we may discover that this division is not sufficient when individuals and companies seek to consciously create their image on the web. Combining business and private life in one is becoming more and more common. Therefore we can find on facebook profiles of non existing people which are brand of new products like “Ipla rozrywkowa”, “Mały głód” or dr Houses profile. The same happens with people having small business or freelancers who are in truing to find clients trough facebook and their friends.

Part 3

Give me your facebook logs and I'll tell you who you are

Construction of facebook.com, the development of its various functions comes mainly from expectations of it's users. By looking into what people want to hide and what to publicly reveal, we can make a typology of what type of information is important to people. On facebook profile page called "information" is the part titled "Basic Information" we can find their first name, surname, and gender. “Gender” is not displayed by default in the profile and can only be expressed if you so wish. An interesting field is the "date of birth," which is equipped with an additional option to hide the year of birth or completely hide your date of birth. This follows from the fact that the authors of the site for marketing purposes, want to have information about your birthrate, therefore it gives users the possibility to hide it (rather than leaving the field BLANK.) The desire to hide the age seems to be quite natural, in real life we estimate it rather intuitively. People quite common hide their date of birth on facebook it may suggest fear of exclusion both those too young as well as those too old.

Data collected by facebook such as city of residence, birth, district, adding to the profile of family relationships can be used both finding friends easier, and better matching of advertising campaigns to the user. So the campaign message can be limited to the target city or even neighborhood. More than that important seems to be a field, "Relationship status" with options including Single, 'It's Complicated "," Open Relationship ", introducing some new forms of cohabitation that are so often described by researchers as characteristic of postmodern societies. In the "Interested in" you can select both Men and Women gives a certain kind of freedom to people with non-heterosexual sexual orientation. Other available fields are the "Political Views" and "Religious Views" allows you to type any of the strings. Its common these fields are often left empty by users, or are serve as a joke such as "Religious Views: no thanks." This could suggest a lack of interest in participation in the political life of facebook users, however people often share "COSES" and the number of groups presenting specific models of worldview. However, this may confirm the observations of population of new forms of social movements characteristic for postmodern societies. Field "Looking for" can reveal the motivations of having an account, according to the creators of facebook users can look for "Frendship", "Dating", "A Relationship", "Networking." Given the collection of data this site acquires, such as the completed school and the workplace you can use facebook freely to find a better job. Facebook therefore can be both micro-blog service, dating site or professional service. Perhaps this ambiguity and the opportunity to create their own profiles in the various fields of interests is one of the characteristics of the network society.

People use Facebooks basic functions such as status updates where thy say "What's on your mind?", posting photos, videos, notes and sharing links. In addition user can decide which groups of friends should receive particular publications, and which information is displayed publicly. Furthermore, facebook privacy settings are so precise that you can specify access rights to each page element individually for each person or group. "Newsfeed" for each user is different because it has a different list of friends on facebook, therefore, may it may create the false impression of existence of some kind of unified vision of the world. This can happens because our friends are usually similar to as in some ways. Our friends often will publish views similar to ours. For example an activist of environmental organization will have a lot of friends who will publish a lot of information about environmental issues. This activist my think that everybody is concerned by the environment. News-feed can create an impression that the whole Poland and Warsaw are interested in one a problem or issue. While other users in the same time are quite busy with other things. In this way, Facebook can create illusion of living in a friendly and convenient world as we receive more than ever in history select and incomplete information. The post that aren’t interesting, you can simply hide forever.

The trust of users to each other is very essential for awards of privacy. Experts from Sophos created the Facebook profiles of two fictitious names that are anagrams of the words "false identity" (false identity) and "stolen identity" (stolen identity). Profile of a 21-year "Felettin Daisy" represented by pictures rubber duck toy. In turn, the profile of 56-year "Dinette Stonily" contains a photograph of two cats lying on a blanket. Each of the "women" sent out 100 invitations to a randomly selected people in his age group. Within two weeks, 95 total strangers decided to become friends Daisy and Dinette - more than during the experiment two years ago, which used as bait a plastic frog. The above study illustrates how easy it can be to obtain private records of your life on facebook.

This is how our friends, formed spontaneously and unconsciously while our tastes and criteria for assessment is fundamentally different from that in a purposeful way as a community service can be a marketing tool. Preparing advertising campaigns at the outset of its design sets up narrow or wide target . Facebook in addition to standard data such as age, sex, language provides more accurate information to address a message, which increases impact of the campaign and lowers its cost . While designing a campaign on facebook, you can use the location, education, place of work, language, status keywords, the “Looking for” a partner, and using keywords. The following example illustrates a case study in the selection of target groups for an advertising campaign to promote the wedding photography.

Given the number of members of more than 500 million users giving facebook detailed personal information, and a huge amount of data generated by users this company has the biggest database of human behavior in the world and access to the infinitely large research opportunities.

Castells, Manuel. 2003. Galaxy Internet. Reflections on the Internet, business and society, Poznan: Rebis.

Slevin J. (2008). Internet and form relationships. [In:] P. Sztompka Bogunia-Borawska M. (ed.), Sociology of everyday life (pp. 594-627). Kraków: Znak.