Online Social Networking Behavior: The Case of Facebook

This is the first study I have read that really tries to break down and analyze people’s social behavior on Facebook, and I thought it has some very revealing information. It takes into consideration some important factors such as introversion vs. extroversion, gender, and self-esteem. On the topic of gender in online social networks, I am not really surprised that females have larger numbers of friends on their social networks; I am generalizing here, but I do see a lot of females that have a large network of friends in their face-to-face interactions, and to me it always seems that they are expected to be “chattier” than males for some reason. So I can see how that can spread into their online interactions. However, I did think it was interesting that “although women are expected to be more protective and selective in online communication atmospheres,” they were more likely to accept friend requests from people they many not know very well (78).

Another interesting point of this study was the connection between self-esteem and the amount of strangers in one’s online network of friends. People with a high level of self-esteem were more selective about who they "friended" than people with low self-esteem. It seems that people were are more self-conscious of themselves are willing to take chances that this stranger could be a nice online friend, while a person with high-self esteem might think, “Eh, I don’t know this person and I don’t think I’ll ever talk to them.”