Social Media: Stanford Students on Facebook (Part II)

Our group created a survey for Stanford students to analyze the social media they use regularly. The survey contained of the following question:

“Let us say you are sitting in lecture and your professor introduces Mark Zuckerberg (CEO/President/Co-founder of Facebook) as a guest speaker. Mr. Zuckerberg begins the class by passing around a slip of paper to each student with one question: "If you could change Facebook in any way, what would you do?" Zuckerberg gives the incentive that the top 5 best ideas will be incorporated into the social networking site within the next year. What would you write?”

Some of the responses we received were:

“There needs to be better actions taken against spam.”

“I would incorporate a professional aspect to Facebook so websites like linkedin are necessary. It would keep everything in one place. So the idea would have a personal profile which is what we all have now and then a professional profile which companies could use to see your resume and work experience and things like that.”

“Better security!”

“Ability to video chat over Facebook in group chat setting.”

“I would add contact management capabilities. Specifically:

1. The ability to redesign my ‘facebook workspace’ to make it more conducive to networking and organizing contacts

2. Private tagging / grouping of people, for example I want to tag people as ‘runners’ or ‘bankers at Morgan Stanley’ or ‘engineers’

3. A reminder system to help me stay in touch with people”

It seems that student users are most preoccupied with ease of information access, privacy, and further means of communication. Those that are interested in using Facebook for professional or business networking means would enjoy features that easily “group” people into manageable categories.

A curious thing about our survey results is the number of responses concerning privacy. It seems contradictory that those using Facebook (a medium for publicizing oneself) are seeking more privacy. Yet it is logical that as more people use Facebook and other social networks, the opportunities to “hack” profiles and need to protect one’s information would increase.

In addition (and the most important for our group’s analysis), we included a system for students to rank their most commonly used means of communication with friends and family, giving each medium a score from 1 (being what they used the most) to 11 (being what they use the least).

A sampling of our results follows:

· 31.6% of students use “face-to-face conversation” the most

· 5.3% of students use “letters (post)” the most

· 31.6% of students use “text messages on mobile phones” the most

· 21% of people gave “letters (post)” a score of 5 or lower

· 74% of people gave “Facebook” a score of 5 or lower

· 84% of people gave “face-to-face conversation” a score of 5 or lower

· 80% of people gave “text messages on mobile phones” a score of 5 or lower

I was surprised at some of the results we received. Particularly, the fact that text messaging is on nearly the same footing as face-to-face conversations.

What do these results say about the fate of other means of communication in the face of technology?

As discussed in my “Has Facebook driven social interaction into a corner?” series, the value of the letter has significantly decreased. From our survey data, it appears that face-to-face conversations are also nearing subordinating to technology. What is the cause of this? Perhaps social networking sites and cell phones are keeping rates of in-person communication low. Perhaps the increasing pace of people’s lives forces them to use technology. A deeper question should follow: What increases the pace of people’s lives? My answer would be technology. As mentioned in previous posts, technology appears to be the cause and remedy of this increase in pace. In such a situation, can the world ever slow down?

Survey link:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/JVKJD7C