What is Facebook?
We do not assume all readers are familiar with Facebook and the services available to its users. Therefore, we provide a short overview of its features. This overview is based on the Facebook Timeline layout as it was available in October 2012. Individuals can create an account on the website Facebook.com. After providing some personal information (name, date of birth, gender, email address), the new user chooses a password and gets account access. Facebook opts for a highly standardized layout of user accounts. Regardless of whose account it is, many features appear on the same place on the screen, making it easy to recognize and find the data one is searching for. There are two important pages on this account: home and profile. The profile page, also often called ‘the wall’, is where users present themselves. A small profile picture adds to a large cover photo at the top of the page, below which the name of the user is presented along with some basic information and a few buttons referring to friends, photos, and “likes.” Below that is the area where “status updates” appear. Users can post anything they want in their status, and friends can respond to this statement by text comments or by liking it (shown directly below the status). On the home page, also often called “news feed,” users are informed on the status updates and other activities (joining groups or becoming fan of something they like) from their friends. It thus automatically and chronologically reflects the highlights of what friends have been doing in the past hours. Once a profile is created, the new user can start looking for friends and send friend requests. When accepted, Facebook connects the two individuals by allowing them to see each other’s profile page and by adding their activities to one another’s news feed. Facebook thus functions as an online application to see and to be seen (Stroud, 2008) or to “prosume”: producing and consuming at the same time (Le and Tarafdar, 2009; Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010). Facebook and the individual Although it is important to consider the basic features of Facebook, it is even more essential to consider how the platform is actually being used, and by whom. In this section, we focus on the psychological literature regarding Facebook, and summarize why individuals want(ed) to join Facebook, what personality users have, how they build a network of friends, how they disclose information, and how they interact. Shortcomings are presented when any are found.
Initial motivations to join Facebook
Sledgianowski and Kulviwat (2009) were among the first to investigate why individuals wanted to join Facebook. Their convenience sample of 289 students from one American university indicated that the perceived playfulness and the critical mass of the site were the main drivers of intentions to join, besides normative pressure, trust, usefulness, and ease of use. Later research would confirm the importance of pressure. Cheung and Lee (2010), for example, studied a convenience sample of 389 students and marked the importance of social identity (being aware of group membership and attaching emotional significance to it) and subjective norms (compliance). Kwon and Wen’s (2010) research on a sample of 229 Korean respondents linked these two studies by showing a positive correlation between perceived usefulness and social identity. Pressure appears to remain important also after joining the SNS, as Skageby’s (2009) document analysis showed that users are unhappy with pressure to accept friend requests from coworkers and employers.
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