Facebook Scholarship and Academia

With a serious but hip academic posing seriously and hip-ly in front of a monitor I would love to own, showing a Facebook profile some dots and lines (presumably social graphs), the New York Times notes how great Facebook is for research. See the whole article here.

Some interesting tidbits from the article:

"Researchers learned that while people perceive someone who has a high number of friends as popular, attractive and self-confident, people who accumulate “too many” friends (about 800 or more) are seen as insecure."

We've been recommending that schools find the folks with many friends, as they will have the widest social networking sites "reach" with their news feed (assuming they are active and effective with the sites). Perhaps we need to define a good range. More can quickly lead to "too many".

"An important finding, Ms. Ellison said, was that students who reported low satisfaction with life and low self-esteem, and who used Facebook intensively, accumulated a form of social capital linked to what sociologists call “weak ties.” A weak tie is a fellow classmate or someone you meet at a party, not a friend or family member. Weak ties are significant, scholars say, because they are likely to provide people with new perspectives and opportunities that they might not get from close friends and family. “With close friends and family we’ve already shared information,” Ms. Ellison said."

It's this last little quote that sparks thoughts for me. We throw around "Relationship = Influence" as a simple leadership axiom and tend to be looking for ways to increase relationship as a means of increasing engagement and learning. While this is still the policy approach that makes sense (the pervasive problem is not enough relationship), it's interesting to equate the "weak ties" with diversity and new information. This suggests the social programming goal is not more quantity and quality of relationships, but that quantity of the right quality is optimum - where quality is defined by strong enough to pay attention and weak enough to be new.

Great that these ideas are going mainstream. This will reduce the friction within the schools to Red Rover research and assessment.