• Does auto change residential segregation?• Does telephone make us more or less

sociable?• Does TV viewing make us more violent?• Does Internet use make us lonely &

depressed

100 year tradition of research on social impact of technology

•  

• 2• 2

Effects of telephone on sociability• Introduced for business

communication (doctors, factory & owner)

• Quickly appropriated by farm family (esp. isolated women) and teens for “frivolous” communication

• Fischer argues that the widespread adoption of the phone didn’t change human attributes, but allowed sociability to be expressed more easily, especially by the interpersonally under privileged

• 3• 3

Effects of Media Violence on Aggression

• Compelling experimental & longitudinal evidence showing TV watching increases likelihood of aggression, both immediately & years later

• Effects similar for women & men, kids & adults, lower & middle class

•Anderson, C. A., Berkowitz, L., Donnerstein, E., Huesmann, L. R., Johnson, J. D., Linz, D., et al. (2003). Then influence of media violence on youth. Psychological Science in the Public Interest., 4(3), 81-11

• 5• 5

Evidence That TV Is in Part Responsible for a Drop in US Social Capital Since 1950

1. Demonstrate the drop in American social capital starting ~ 1960

2. Explore causes• Did the potential cause have similar

time course to the change in social capital?

• Are cross-sectional associations consistent?

3. Possible causes1. Generational2. Suburbanization3. Women in the workforce4. TV (2001)

• 6• 6

Internet Use — Like TV or Phone?• The Internet has features making it like the

TV and the phone• Phone: Interpersonal communication• TV: Entertainment-oriented. Lots of violence

• 7• 7

The Positive View• Computer mediated communication increases

choices and supplements traditional communication• Lowers coordination costs• Opens communication to distant partners• Increase the number of ties people maintain• Supplements phone and in-person communication,

rather than replacing them• May be especially useful for lonely, social

anxious or social peripheral peopleInternet use & SNS builds social capitalInternet use should improve well-being

• 8• 8

• 9• 9

• Concentric circles of decreasing intimacy increase in size by factor of 3• Dunbar hypothesizes that social carrying capacity limited by • Brain capacity that sets limits on “core social cognitive abilities” allowing

us to maintain social complexity• Time & energy we can devote to social contact to maintain strong-enough

ties• Question: Does the Internet in general & social networking sites in

particular change the limits?

Dunbar’s Number(s)

• Support

• Sympathy • group

• Clan• Large • tribe

• Band • ??

• 10

• 10

Median Facebook user has ~ 180 friends:Differ on strength of the tie

• 11

• 11

Distribution of network sizes

Personal network sizes of approximately 11,000 Facebook users. The majority fall within Dunbar’s number, but 40% have more than 150 ties, and 10% have more than 500 ties. The x-axis is truncated at 1600 ties for clarity, but users may have up to 5000 ties.

Facebook ties vary on closeness:

Gilbert & Karahalios: A way to automatically estimate Facebook tie strength

Gilbert, E., & Karahalios, K. (2009). Predicting tie strength with social media CHI'09: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems (pp. 211-220). New York, NY: ACM Press.

• 13

• 13

Methods• University students and staff walk their Facebook

account and describe tie strength for random friends• N=65 subjects reporting on 2,184 Facebook ties

• 14

• 14

Predicting Tie Strength

• 15 variables predicts ~26% of variance• 73 variables predicts ~53% of variance

• 15

• 15

Size & Density of Facebook Network Depends on Effort

• Average user has 180+ friends on the site

• Maintained Relationships: people for whom a user had clicked on a News Feed story or visited their profile more than twice.

• One-way Communication: people with whom a person has communicated.

• Mutual Communication: people with whom a person had had reciprocal communications, or an active exchange of information between two parties.

• 16

• 16

A More Negative View• Computer mediated communication is inferior to

the gold standard of face-to-face communication

• Slower, with less communication per time spent• Loss of expressive power• Loss of social context• Biases communication toward weak ties

Internet degrades social relationships conducted over it

• 17

• 17

• 19

• 19

Long history of research on this topic

• 20

• 20

Do Facebook friends provide the benefits of other forms of social capital?

• Burke, M., & Kraut, R. (2013). Using Facebook after losing a job: Differential benefits of strong and weak ties CSCW'13: (pp. 1419-1430). NY: ACM.

• 21

• 21

Measuring well-being & social capital

• 22

• 22

Facebook use & changes in support

• 1 SD more directed, one-on-one communication with strong ties (~60 msgs or likes) increase social support .05 SD

• 1 SD more passive communication reduces social support .02 SD

• 23

• 23

When is the effect larger?

• When communicating with strong ties > weak ties

• 24

• 24

Effects are strong

• 25

• 25

Facebook use & finding a job

• 1-on-1 communication with strong ties doubles probability of finding a job (from 15.7% to 33.2%)

• 1-on-1 communication with weak ties halves the probability