In many offices, Fridays are casual day. However, for Psychster's offices in Seattle and Portland - and for people nationwide interested in the ways that people behave online and off - Fridays mark a much more exciting occasion than just getting to wear jeans. The occasion is the weekly Psychster Labs call - a think tank of researchers, social media gurus, and others who understand that people are people whether online or off.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=c14663bb-c289-45b3-aa82-2d2570e63494)
In our last call, we pored over the 2007 special issue of Journal of Computer Mediated Communication together. Although some things have changed in the three years since the special issue was released, it's actually an added intrigue to mark time by reading these articles as well as examining their still-relevant lessons. A great example of this effect came from our study and discussion of Writing for Friends and Family: The Interpersonal Nature of Blogs by Michael Stefanone (University of Buffalo) and Chyng-Yang Jang (University of Texas, Arlington).
In the past, the only people who got to widely broadcast information about their lives were celebrities - after all, going on the Johnny Carson show is a pretty fantastic means of disclosing things about yourself to a wide network of people. However, with the broad-based communication tools of social media available to virtually everyone, is Perez Hilton correct in asserting to YouJustGetMe's own Nick Mattos that in the modern setting everyone will be "famous" to fifteen people?
In their study, Stefanone and Jang took a hard look at personal bloggers - folks who maintain an online presence analogous to an offline diary on a site like LiveJournal or Blogger. This study was conducted in 2007 - right about the time that the social networking savvy were switching from personal blogs to things like Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook. Jang and Stefanone set out to discover what personality traits personal bloggers possessed, and what sort of effect the blog had on the offline social networks of the bloggers themselves.
Before talking about the research findings, it's worth it to define a central concept of the study. Social scientists often talk about people's "ego-centric networks" - an academic term for the cloud of friends and acquaintances that you know which, if diagrammed, would have you at the center and lines connecting you to other people in your life. Some of these ties are more tenuous, or "weak" - for example, a friend you only talk to occasionally, or don't reveal much about yourself to. Other ties are "strong" - you both know a lot about one another, and feel a sense of intimacy with each other. Strong ties, or close relationships, are quite "costly" - they involve a great deal of time, involvement, and risk to develop. You have to expend yourself significantly more to cultivate these relationships!
Returning to Jang and Stefanone - the researchers identified, fairly unsuprisingly, that folks who maintained personal blogs had personalities with high levels of extraversion and high levels of self-disclosure. However, somewhat less logically, the bloggers were significantly "closer" to larger groups of friends. The bloggers were actually using a very "cost-effective" means of disclosing information about themselves to strong-tie ego-centric networks - in other words, they were actually deepening their existing friendships!
This has a fascinating implication: in this era, people who are both extraverted and who possess a high level of self-disclosure in their personalities now have access to "cost-saving" tools that enable them to develop and maintain more close friendships than the average person would have in the past. In other words, the average person's circle of friends can be bigger than the average person's circle even twenty years ago!
Hopefully, this gives you an idea of the exciting topics and stimulating discussion that occur every Friday as part of Psychster Labs. Interested in joining us on the frontier of technology and the social sciences? Apply to participate in our weekly Psychster Labs calls!
Leave a comment