Facebook Could Be The Best And Worst Thing To Happen To Your Life

Source: Forbes

Angela Paradise and Meaghan Sullivan conducted a study examining undergraduates uses and their perceived affects of Facebook by giving out a survey to 357 undergraduates in the Northeastern United States. The study had three main focuses: personal relationships, employment opportunities, and privacy.

The study was conducted from the theoretical framework of the third-person effect, which predicts that people perceive themselves as invulnerable to the negative effects of social media while perceiving others as more affected. Historically, this method was applied to perceptions of the effects of traditional media (i.e media violence, pornography, rap music, etc.) and this is the first study to apply this to a social media site.

The results of the study showed that the only time that the third-person effect wasn't true during this study was when it came to the participant perceptions of Facebook's negative influence on their closest friends' personal relationship. However, this is because if a respondent doesn't think their own relationships are negatively affected by Facebook, they're less likely to think their friends' relationships are negatively affected since they're considered to be part of the respondents personal relationships.

Facebook May Be Affecting Your Public Life in New Ways

When participants in the study were asked how many "friends" they had on Facebook, the result was an average of about 480 friends each, with 28% of participants admitting to accepting friend requests from strangers. Yet, results show that participants viewed their own personal privacy as less likely to be negatively affected by Facebook users than others. Are they forgetting the network that's seeing all of their posts?

Source: The Guardian

Results from preliminary questions display that 69% of participants have privacy settings that allow only current friends to view posts, and 64% of participants use Facebook everyday, and about 4 times daily for about 37 minutes. This means that while it's only who you've accepted or requested to be your friend on Facebook can see your posts, that's still typically a network of nearly 500 (probably) frequent users seeing your posts, some of which you may not know or even like for that matter.

While all of this may seem insignificant to the average user, 45% of hiring managers use social networking sites like Facebook to research job candidates. But maybe you already have a job so this statistic doesn't affect you--but it's nothing to bat an eyelash at, since more and more people are being terminated from their current jobs for content found to be inappropriate by superiors.

Source: Conrad Goodman IT Services

In terms of strengthening regulation on Facebook, women were shown to be more supportive but there was no relationship found between the third person perceptual gap and pro-regulatory attitudes. This is most likely the result of students thinking that Facebook is a generally harmless, ambiguous activity unlike other media content (such as pornography and media violence).

Nevertheless, Paradise and Sullivan believe that findings of the third-person perceptual gap may be partly due to the student-participants perceiving themselves to be smarter than others and strongly recommend future studies should sample populations that aren't mostly Caucasian undergraduates as this study was 92% Caucasians.

How Facebook Has Changed Young Relationships

From flirting to breaking up, social media and mobile phones are woven into teens' romantic lives. The Pew Research Center conducted a study to discover Facebook's effect on relationship on teens aged 13-17 years old by holding sixteen online and in-person focus groups.

The study found that while a lot of friendships begin online, most romantic relationships are still becoming exclusive in person. Nonetheless, the study revealed that half of teens have expressed interest by adding a crush on Facebook and that the most common online social media venue for teens to "meet" romantic partners is Facebook.

The most important part of a relationship is communication (amongst others) but these teens are well aware of that. Most teens assume that they and their partner will check in with each other with great regularity throughout the day. But when asked specifically, most teens said they expect to hear from their significant other once a day or every few hours while few said they expect to hear from their partner hourly or declined to comment; this data is reflected in the graph below.

All good things must come to an end, and it's not always a happy one. 18% of teens with dating experience have experienced or initiated a breakup by sending a private message, posting about it publicly, or changing their relationship status on Facebook.

The bad news doesn't end there; 11% of teen daters have accessed a mobile device or online account of a current or former partner, and 10% have modified or even deleted their partner or ex-partners profile altogether. Apparently this isn't a hard task in today's society, being that 13% of teens reporting that partners have demanded that they share their passwords to personal email and other internet accounts with them.

This can have lasting effects, too, with 18% of teen daters admitting that current or former partners have required them to remove former boyfriends/girlfriends from their friends list from Facebook or other social media alike. And this is notably for the best considering 11% of teens report that a former partner has contacted them on the internet to threaten to harm them with 8% saying that ex-partners have then used information on the internet against them, such as to harass or embarrass them.