If you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon— Bokonon
Social media. The term is empty, does not have real meaning. It is a trap, a slippery eel. In the undying words of Kurt Vonnegut; it is a granfalloon. The question to ask is, as always, does anyone earn money on it?
The researcher that wrote the book on media we used in my digital media bachelor, tweeted an article from Discovery News via ABC a while back. Apparently, a bunch of other researchers in USA have researched Facebook, using it as a tool for personality analysis – or more popular term; personality test. They state some depressingly obvious things, but elegantly jump to what I will describe as utter loony-off-their-trolleys conclusions. And no-one bats an eyelid.
They use the methods and categories of sociology (I will not say “traditionally used in..”, as this lends it an air of antiquity which it does not deserve or merit), and from the information people give about themselves, they test if that is consistent with other personality tests. Apparently. Apart from the fact that I suspect a lot of personality tests are utter rubbish, this seems a little scientifically thin to me. “Sociology Mickey-Mouse-science looks through tech”. Nevermind. Let me quote a conclution from ABC’s article:
“The researchers also found that people with long last names tended to be more neurotic, perhaps because “a lifetime of having one’s long last name misspelled may lead to a person expressing more anxiety and quickness to anger,” according to the study, which is being presented this week at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Vancouver.”
Read that again. We take these people seriously? We pay them? We let them play in their labs for this? They spend electricity, occupy space as they come up with this? I find a lot of sociology methodology highly questionable, but this is bonkers. Hot air conjured up from hot air. Oh, wait, .. duh. I actually checked the publish date on this article, to be absolutely sure it was not an aprils fool.
But the rant does not end there. The guy who tweeted, whose books was on my curriculum, is the guy the media calls when they need a “social media expert” (how the meta-levels on this works is mind-boggling). I tweeted back to him, asking if he seriously thought that people with long surnames are more neurotic than others? His disturbing answer was “science has spoken!”
As I said, it is a granfalloon.
Maybe I got it all wrong. Maybe this is an endlessly intelligent study, a wonderfully insightful paper and wondrous presentations. If so, the journalist at Discovery News should find something else to do. Communication: it is so hard that not even journalists and communication media PhD’ers can do it.
My question would be…what classifies as neurotic? This kind of stuff makes me crazy!
I am sure that if facebook would tell how tall people are, they would find a correlation between a positive attitude and height, or that brown-haired people are partial to lemon pie. All very scientific.
The bit I didn’t bother to elaborate on, was that they say they only used FB info that everyone can see, for everyone. There is no such thing. That makes me think that the subjects are not very random/representative either.
Basically, a granfalloon.
A granfalloon indeed. However, I usually dismiss anything that states scientific and FB in the same paragraph. I am sure it is possible to analyze FB scientifically, but whatever the study is, if FB is mentioned, I’m already gone :-) Like your rants, though :-) Feel much the same way.
G
Seems to me they have the wrong end of the stick. FB can, I am sure, be scientifically researched, but the starting point are defined from what results they initially want, and therefore pointless.
had to chuckle over this one. i must say though that in a world of so many outlets to connect socially, we have become nothing more than a faceless society hiding behind closed doors.
Chuckles is good! I approve!
Humph. In my time, I’ve fled both academia and Facebook, and still regret neither.
I have dragged a few lanterns along with me, though, little concepts capable of illuminating life. One of those is Abraham Kaplan’s concept of the “duologue”, human occasions where everyone talks and no one listens. The perfect duologue, Kaplan says, would be two television sets turned on, facing one another.
He came up with this in the late 60s, and I swear – it’s more relevant today than it was then. Or at least as relevant. Or more broadly applicable. I wonder if Kaplan’s still alive, and if he is, I wonder what he thinks of FB.
For the brief time I was on Facebook, I was astonished by several things – the inanity of the postings, the constriction of context and the need to spend increasing amounts of time there to “keep up” with things. It took six weeks before I finally took a look and quietly googled “how to permanently leave facebook”.
I’m probably missing out on something because I’m not there, but I’ll never know about it. ;-)