Like This If You Facebook'd Today

We were talking about the impact of Facebook on this election in class on Monday.  I think there were about 4 or 5 of us that said that some of their news came from Facebook.  I offer this as Exhibit A in the discussion on influence.


In a recent journal article in Nature, James Fowler from the University of California, San Diego paired up with Cameron Marlow over at Facebook to figure out if social networks can create real world behaviors.  They had a very specific behavior in mind, and a very specific target to aim for: your friends.
“The network is key,” Fowler said. “If we want to make the world a better place on a massive scale, we should focus not just on changing a person’s behavior, but also on utilizing the network to influence that person’s friends,” he said.
So how did it work?  They randomly selected a group of people (with the blessing of the Facebook people) to target with different kinds of notifications.  Some people saw a message that said "you should vote and check here to find where," while others saw that same message but with photos of friends who voted included.  Still, a third group, got no messages at all.  Ready for the shocker?  People who got messages were more likely to vote.  And of that group, the people who got messages accompanied by photos of other buddies who also voted, came to the polls in droves.

I can't tell you that I am surprised.  I am still influenced by my peer group.  I feel so manipulated!  At the ripe old age of noneofyourbusiness, I realize that I probably would still do something just because my friends are doing it, too.

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In the ninth edition of the the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism: the State of the News Media noted that there are a handful of companies like Facebook, Amazon and Google that are gunning to become our everything digital.  Our overwhelming use of these products also give these company all of the data they would ever dream to want about our personal lives.  The advertising dollars are following you on Facebook.  The Pew report says, "By 2015, roughly one out of every five display ad dollars is expected to go to Facebook."  They are betting a lot of money on the idea that we will buy what we see on the sidelines of our social media.

Just because we are using Facebook to make decisions about things like voting, and perhaps purchases, doesn't mean that we're using it for our primary source for news.  Still according to Pew: 

Social media are important but not overwhelming drivers of news, at least not yet. Some 133 million Americans, or 54% of the online U.S. population, are now active users on Facebook (out of 850 million monthly active users globally).²They also spend an average of seven hours there a month, 14 times the amount of time people spend on average on the most popular news sites.³ And the number of Twitter users grew 32% last year to around 24 million active users in the U.S. (500 million total accounts worldwide), the company reports. 

Maybe there's hope.

More on politics tomorrow.