Review by Kairi Fimberg
The objective of the research is to investigate the relationship between use of social networking sites and feelings of social capital. It’s a common belief that social networking sites complement the network of relationships present in the offline world by providing a platform for active communication between friends and more passive observation through aggregated streams of social news. The current paper uses empirical data from Facebook, the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users, to validate previous findings from a number of studies that have mainly relied on self-reports by college students.
The demographics of the most popular social networking sites are rapidly changing. Today, more than ever, older Internet users are flocking to social sites to join in the conversation. In fact, the most significant growth among these sites in the last several years has been among adults 50 years and older, which has steadily upped the average user age across the board, being 38 years old, according to Flowtown, who compiles demographic statistics about social network usage, including Facebook. The number one social network has come a long way since first launching exclusively to college students.
Social networking is the way the 21st century communicates today. According to Jesse Rice, the author of The Church of Facebook, online social networks are connecting people like never before. And with millions of users, they’re creating a virtual world that erases all boundaries. It’s a movement that is changing how we form relationships, perceive others, and shape our identity. Yet at their core, these sites reflect our need for community. Our need for intimacy, connection, and a place to simply belong. The question is – do these networks help or hurt relationships? Does social networking increase social well-being and reduce loneliness, or vice versa?
There is no doubt Facebook has affected the social life and activity of people in various ways and it needs no research to prove that social relationships are critical to our well-being, which is mostly increased by life goals associated with family, friends, social and political life and decreased by goals associated with career success and material gains. Facebook has proved to be able to reunite lost family members and friends. However, some studies have named Facebook as a source of problems in relationships. Several news stories have suggested that using Facebook causes divorce and infidelity – claims that have been questioned and refuted by other commentators.
Research in a number of academic fields has shown that social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals. Although social networking is possible in person, especially in the workplace, universities, and high schools, it is most popular online. This is because unlike most high schools, colleges, or workplaces, the internet is filled with millions of individuals who are looking to meet other people, to gather and share information and experiences about common interests. The topics and interests are as varied and rich as the story of our world.
Burke, Marlow and Lento point to earlier studies of social interaction online that tended to show Internet or SNS users as lonely because the pool of interactants was small. At the time of their survey, Facebook had a worldwide user base of 350 million users. Today this number has already doubled, reaching 600 million active users as of January 2011, most of whom also have their entire social circles on the site. Internet opens new options for communication and changes in the way people communicate are important, because communication is the mechanism people use to develop and maintain social relationships, valuable for their physical and mental health. Social participation makes people happy. Giving to others seems to be a gift for the giver as well. Thus, people who are engaged in local activities, who meet friends or relatives regularly, and who help others are more likely to report higher levels of happiness or life satisfaction. Social networks just make it a whole lot easier. We should be looked at as an „arm extension“ rather than a substitute to personal interaction.
Burke, Marlow and Lento investigate three measures of social well-being: bridging social capital (access to new information through a diverse set of acquaintances), bonding social capital (emotional support from close friends), and loneliness. They distinguish between two types of activity, directed communication and consumption, and predict:
H1. Bonding social capital will increase with the amount of direct communication.
H2. Loneliness will decrease with the amount of direct communication.
H3. Bridging social capital will increase with consumption.
H4. Consumption will be associated with loneliness.
They find it surprsing that, while directed communication is associated with greater feelings of bonding social capital and lower loneliness, users who consume greater levels of content report reduced bridging and bonding social capital and increased loneliness. But when you think about it, it’s actually quite obvious because we only interact with a small core of our friend network and for the majority of our network, we keep track of our friends’ activities through the news feed. The truth about friendship seems to be valid also in social networks. It’s not the number of acquaintances that matters, but the relationship, the real friend qualities that are the most important. In the era of SNS, when the overall network size grows and news from our friends keep coming in an unstoppable flow, we may simply feel lost in the amount of information. Because as soon as we’re away for a few hours, we have more than 300 recent updates that we miss and and feel the urge to catch up with.
A lot of people are living a life based on what looks good on their Facebook profile. Often, it is the result of Facebook envy – the feeling you get when you come across an old friend on Facebook and realize that their life turned out way better and is more interesting than yours – and a key element of the Facebook paradox – the inverse proportion between the number of friends one has on Facebook and the number of friends one has in real life. Relationships are now called Facebook official, which means that they are determined official by posting it under the relationship status on Facebook, making it public for everyone to see when people make up or break up. Facebook may be a great way to reconnect with old friends, but it's not always easy on relationships. Some people live their lives online, while their partners don’t. To some extent, the divide is generational, experts say. People under 30 tend to feel more comfortable letting it all hang out online, while those in the 40s often don't. In one way or another, these are only a few examples of a long list of phenomenon Facebook has brought about and definitely not the example of the healthiest use of the social networking service.
In the study by Burke, Marlow and Lento, all of the hypothesis, except for H3, are confirmed. Their predictiction that users maintain their large, diverse networks by monitoring site content not specifically targeted at a given user is disproved as consumption seems to be associated with reduced bridging social capital. Nonetheless, the present study confirms previous survey-based findings that greater SNS use, mainly direct communication within the network, is associated with increased social capital and reduced loneliness. This can be interpreted by assuming that people who feel more socially connected gravitate toward technical systems that reify those connections, suggesting that communication in one medium stimulates the others. It is also true that using sites like Facebook allows people to reinforce fledgling and distant relationships. Tales of reunited family and friends can be read on Facebook Stories.
Therefore, the main goals of the study are achieved. It helps to tease out the relative weight of different activities online and their relationship to social well-being. It shows that the common tool for estimating SNS use, the Facebook Intensity Scale, correlates relatively well with actual site behaviour (empirical data from Facebook), which means that users are generally good at self-reporting their friend count and time online. However, as the participants were recruited via an ad on Facebook, it would be a good idea to also include responses of people who choose not to use social networking online. The results were extended to an international, English-speaking audience. However, different languages are likely associated with varying beliefs abd cultural norms that may affect the results. For example, a recent survey carried out by the European Commission on social participation and social isolation shows that although there is little variation in the total level of social contacts (more than three quarters of the population meet relatives or friends at least once a month in all the countries), if we focus on daily or weekly meetings, however, there is much greater cultural divergence across Europe. The Mediterranean countries tend to be among the most ‘social’, especially Cyprus, Portugal and Greece, where about 40% or more meet friends or relatives on a daily basis. At the other end of the scale are the Baltic States, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden, where only 5-9% meet relatives every day. The difference between the two extremes, in terms of the share of population meeting relatives daily, is ninefold.
People tend to have more virtual contacts than personal ones. Friendships, love relationships, professional contacts, etc are increasingly nurtured in a virtual way: via mobile phones or the Internet. It seems to be more widespread in relationships with relatives, and more prevalent in countries with lower levels of social contacts. On the other hand, virtual contacts and personal meetings tend to reinforce each other, rather than being complementary, as we are more likely to phone or e-mail friends whom we meet anyway.
One thing is sure, the more Facebook and similar social networking sites grow, the bigger social impact they make and the deeper we need to delve into analyzing their effects. We can intuitively assume that meeting friends makes people happy. But how much is it so, for example compared to the effect of income? Is helping and volunteering a source of contentment, or rather do they decrease the well-being of the helper? There is no one answer to what makes people happy or satisfied. We can assume that happiness is a group thing – you are happy if other people in your network are happy. It thus seems to be the case, online as well as offline, that when you smile, the world smiles with you. We also mustn't forget that social well-being is only domain of the overall well-being – an important one though.
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