I'm in the process of developing a series of questions that would assess the meaning and purpose of Facebook to participants on an everyday basis. For now, I've got the following leads:
Just how conscious of the invisible audience (to borrow a term from danah boyd) are users? How often are they thinking about it and who do they envision them as? Do they view the system or nonhuman components as part of the audience?
How do participants employ the service as a supplementary or primary informing agent? What parts of the ecology do they explicitly (Google it! < Facebook it!) or implicitly (rapid cognition, impression management) use to become informed, and in what ways?
How important is Facebook as a communication medium? Do students or other users choose it over AIM or texting? Where does Facebook fall - in terms of priority, context, and versatility compared to other ICT's?
How does the interface (Permanently Beta & Cyborging of the Mind) cause differences in use as compared to more traditional web services? Say like using Facebook as a blog, Marketplace as an Ebay replacement, or the differences in photo sharing (say Flickr or DeviantArt).
How do elements of the system communicate indirectly (outside of active messaging)? Do conversations, cues and group memberships manifest through media, news, and alterations to the system? Obviously yes but how to we categorize, classify, or best find a method to understand this?
What high level behaviors and theories of interaction can we pull from the world of psychology?
Visualizations are cool and can reveal user patterns beyond what ordinary observations might yield. What should/could we visualize?
How can we find some ways users use the system to bolster community social capital? Efforts related to political/organizational social capital are obvious, but personal tie enhancing behavior is less apparent. Does it better enhance strong or weak ties?
The online is invading the offline. How has SNS actively started to change interactions in the face-to-face world?
What happens as people leave the network what happens to their dormant profiles? Do people move on to jobs and worlds without SNS? Could it potentially become a sort of digital graveyard or make-shift year book?
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An adventure in exploring the impacts of one of the most famous
and salient social networking websites on the net today.
About the Facebook Project
http://www.thefacebookproject.com/
Originally started as a sociology research project by Jeff Ginger, a graduate student at the University of Illinois, the Facebook Project includes several researchers, students, librarians, and enthusiasts who all have an important interest in common: Facebook.
The endeavor is a collaborative research effort dedicated to documenting, understanding, and utilizing the social networking service Facebook.com.
Keywords
Facebook, Project, Survey, Interview, Research, Social Networking Service, SNS, Computer Mediated Communication, CMC, Internet Communication Technologies, ICT, Cyborging of the Mind, Permanently Beta, Social Change, UIUC, Library and Information Science, Sociology, New Media Studies, Digital Divide, Race, Identity, Chief Illiniwek, Jeff Ginger
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