#4 - Private vs. Public Communication
Kimberly Biason, Tony Cardell, Jennifer Weber, Maggie Pan
Our group is interested in examining private versus public communication in online settings. Specifically, we will be analyzing wall posting and personal messaging on Facebook. Why do students post on their friend’s wall as opposed to sending them a personal message? Do they use the wall for certain kinds of messages, and personal messaging for other types of messages? Our main objective is to find out when people post on walls and when people use personal messaging to communicate with their friends.
For our study, we will be conducting a survey in which we ask people to perform a list of tasks on Facebook. For example, one task might be to send their friend a message asking them how they are doing. Another task might be to ask their friend a personal question. For each task, they will have the choice of communicating through either wall posting or personal messaging. After the participants complete the tasks, they will note which method they used for each one. At the end of the survey general questions will be asked, such as how often the person checks Facebook. In this way, we can gather both quantitative as well as qualitative data for our research project.
Some other factors that we might also consider or take into account:
- Only friends are allowed to post on a person’s wall.
- Some people hide their walls, which would make the messages private.
- When a student sends a personal message, their friend also gets an email notifying them of the PM.
- Even though a student may have many friends, only a few regularly post on their wall.
We have already started a preliminary examination of Facebook walls. Overall, our group noticed that some messages are rather personal, some are inside jokes, and others are written in other languages. Many students also comment on the profile photo, respond to another wall posting, or just write to say “hi”. Chain messages are popular as well. In general, most of the messages seem to be non-personal, but for those that are, why did the person not use personal messaging instead? In addition, most wall messages are very short (1-2 lines), but a few are rather long. For those lengthy messages, how come they were not sent as PMs?
We hope that our analysis of Facebook can give general insight into the reasons why people choose public online communication over private online communication and vice versa.
posted by X @ 6:18 PM
3 Comments:
I like the idea of studying the difference between public and private communication. I think it’s a good question to consider, why people would choose one form over the other. I think this question has implications for other online communication, such as chat rooms, which implement the same options for public and private conversations.
Are you going to study the kind of language used in the two different forums as well? It would be interesting to see how languages changes when the person knows that only a friend will see this, or if the whole community has access to the message. I think it will be important to make the surveys very specific, so that you can get detailed information about which method they chose, why they chose it, and maybe some information about the message itself.
Interesting topic to attack. The research sounds fascinating, but I think a couple people have accurately pointed out that the observer effect could be troublesome. Like a psychological Schroedinger's Cat. Building on Sarah's suggestion, maybe you should combine a survey of existing wall messages with trying to get permission from a group of people to either a) actually get access to their facebook accts and read their private messages, or b) just ask them about the types of private messages they receive. For example, we've discussed in class the occurence of people breaking up over AIM: has anybody ever been dumped on Facebook?
I like your idea, and I think that it may be worthwhile to take a look at the Facebook wall in a larger context. What I mean is that messaging is a well-known paradigm similar to email, but the wall is a Facebook invention (as far as I know) and is more flexible than many other CMC media.
To a large extent, the wall's users define it by the way they use it, but at the same time it imposes some novel constraints on the form and language of the posts.
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