The Psychology of Facebook Examined 189
jg21 writes "In this analysis of the psychology of Facebook, a British FB user makes some telling points about how simple the reasons behind its success are. Among them, fear of 'online social failure' features prominently. From the article: 'Facebook also digs away at the insecurities in people...your peers can see your profile on Facebook, and while they may have 50, 100, 200 friends they will mockingly see that you have a pathetically small number, confirming your worst fears about the low opinion they have probably held of you over all those years etc.'"
Not Psychology (Score:2, Informative)
More's the pity, because psychology is (as always) a few years behind the times, but some work is finally starting to be done on the real principles governing social networking behavior. Wendi Gardner and one of her graduate students at Northwestern, whose name I am chagrined to admit I cannot recall, have some work in online social perception (though I don't believe it's published yet), and a couple of folks at Berkeley are studying online dating, but I haven't yet seen any good empirical research on Facebook and its ilk.
Facebook -- your Privacy online? (Score:4, Informative)
Your email, address, friends, music, books, other interests, and who you're dating are all available on Facebook for whoever wants that information, together with your political views, club associations, educational background, possibly even your job history.
Besides the information that you yourself put online, Facebook also contains information that it actively gains about you through other means -- just check their privacy policy: [facebook.com]
The US government has let it be known that they want "Total Information Awareness" [wired.com] for a while, and sites like Facebook end up linking all kinds of intimate personal details of large groups of people, making it one of the ideal sources for gathering that information.
The CIA is using Facebook as a recruiting tool [wired.com], but Facebook itself also seems to have gotten its funding from people from people heavily involved in the CIA. [albumoftheday.com]
The CIA has also been very interested in student activities for decades. [cia-on-campus.org] Most of today's leaders got started in political activities as students, and students are much less guarded about their self-expression, so it makes sense that universities would be perfect places to start gathering information for anyone planning to influence future political events.
So go ahead and post all your personal information online, but just be aware of people other than advertisers who might be looking at it and why.