AIBU to be gobsmacked at this re Facebook?

[NickRobinsonsloveslave]

I have been trying to get my act together for a whole week regarding a project I had to do for a Sociology course.
It entailed having to prove or disprove that people's interactions are moving away from the normal face to face stuff, with people just 'speaking' to other people on the internet, texting, emails etc.
Eventually decided to concentrate on Facebook, as that seems to be how most people communicate now. So I 'invented' a false person, added a profile photo of a very attractive woman, sent out some friend invites, but only to folk who would have attended a local school (not mine). I included a fair ratio of men and women, then sat back expecting nothing.
I was amazed to get, not only people accepting my friend requests, but other people asking me to be their friend!
I, as myself, know some of these people, but the persona I invented...name, age, photo, school, etc, is not real. Yet these people accepted me without question.
I am totally gobsmacked, just cannot believe that folk will just believe this stuff. Are they so desperate for friends they will accept anyone or what?
It has certainly given me an angle for my project, but what are these people thinking?

When I first joined fb I found it really fun. I joined an online game and got hooked onto it. The more people you had in your game, the harder it was for anyone to steal your money. I ended up with 430 friends that I never met just because of the game. If your interested in looking it up its called
Mafia Wars.

Anyway one day I read a newspaper article and it was about a bloke who looked at peoples fb pages and would spend ages staring at the photos of the children.

For me it was a wake up call. I removed all of the gaming friends and took myself off the game. I then went into fb security settings and made my profile private. I now will only be friends with people I know.

Norman, if I asked you how many hours a day you spend on social sites rather than talking to someone in RL, would you be completely honest in your reply?
I know someone who spends practically all day on FB, Twitter, etc, but if I asked her how much time she thought she was on them for, she would lie, subconsciously, consciously, whatever, I don't think I'd get an honest answer.
It's like when someone asks you in a survey how many times a week do you have sex? Who doesn't lie about that?

Also, I totally understand people who only want to add their closest friends on Facebook, but I use it in a slightly different way myself. One half is just to able to follow my real friends/family, but I also have lots of people on there who I know from concerts/art world etc and it's often useful to have them on Facebook to find out about what's happening where. I don't actually know these people very well, but I do consider them acquaintances - I run into them fairly regularly and then we often chat for a bit. I have different 'lists' as well which limit some people from seeing my pictures too, for example.
I do agree that adding completely random people is a bit strange, I never got that either.

Just to add, I could sit on FB all day and know exactly how many hours my 'friends' spent on it....it tells me on the left hand side.

First did you get clearance from your uni ethics committee? The sociology dept should have clearly pointed you in that direction.
Second are you sure you were asked to 'prove or disprove'? Those are terms usually associated with maths & pure science, not social science, which is generally more nuanced. I would have expected you to be asked to find evidence for an argument - e.g "What evidence is there that people are moving away from..."
The use of qualitative research would be much more useful here - all you have demonstrated so far is that some people add people they do not know as 'friends' on FB. This is already well known and documented (have you done a literature review?).
you might find it more useful to interview say 6 people about their social interactions on and offline. for example I keep in touch with an old school friend (of 43 yrs standing!) via FB as we live a long way from each other and our original childhood home - but we met up this week in London for the first time in 5 yrs. Now in this case FB has been a way of easily supporting a very long standing relationship - which has been difficult to maintain F2F because of distance.

One thing you have to take into account is the way in which people are far more mobile than they were years ago - we don't live 10 mins from our family or school friends anymore, I have a sibling overseas and one who stayed in the city they went to uni in - school friends scattered to uni towns and overseas, I live over 300 miles from where I grew up. FB isn't the first system to offer this kind of connectivity but it is the current leader and does the job very well.

I think you need to be very clear about what it is you want to suggest is the case (not 'prove' you are not a mathematician!), cite the literature and show good research methodology. you can use the FB 'experiment' (assuming it's been cleared by the ethics committee) but it doesn't tell us very much to be honest.

How do you define a 'friend' though - in RL not just online. I certainly have more than 50 people I would call friends: I like them, they like me, we have stuff in common, we meet up sometimes. I am 46 so have had plenty of time to make lots of friends and though there are some I don't see so much of these days due to not living very close to them, we are still friends. We keep in touch by Facebook, too.
Actually, more importantly (and this is why so much social science study is just wank), if you are going to ask people how many friends they have you will need to make sure that both you and they understand what each other means by the word 'friend'. For some people a friend is someone they have known a long time and trust deeply, for others a friend is anyone they know and like and socialise with.

I'd say you don't have to ask the question. It's not about how much it's about what and why. Survey research leaves many questions unanswered, in depth interview - discursive approach - is much more revealing.

I spend slot of time on social media but it's time I would probably have spent watching TV in rhe past. I like it.

I think it is a bit unethical what you are doing tbh. You have not received consent from these people to participate in a study. It is a bit shady to pretend to be someone else. Are you using our answers in your study as well and not telling us?

DuelingFanjo, that was it exactly. I tend to half listen to Radio 4 throughout the day and this particular topic really grabbed my attention. I thought it was so interesting. Blimey, wish I was related to someone like that!

InAState, mmm, might be, but then would I get the same replies if you knew in advance?

If you listen to R4 - you may have come across Material World's amateur science project, where listeners proposed a research project and the winners were assigned mentors from the scientific world to assist them in carrying out their research.

One of the most interesting was a very well conducted study into the uses people make of their FB profile pictures.

Take a look here if you want to find out more about the methodology and results.

So Norman, instead of using social media as opposed to TV, why did you not just swap the TV for more RL social interaction?

Have you run this past an ethics committee? I am a psychology student and we are not allowed to do stuff like this as undergraduates. Also how valid is it?

piprabbit, that's very interesting. When I selected the photo to represent my profile I was very conscious of the fact that, in order to actually get people looking at me, it had to be a very attractive photo.
Yes I could have just put my RL self on it, but I doubt it would have had the same effect, ie, attractive strangers actually asking me to be their friend.
It does seem to show that FB is all about appearances.

I am a SAHM mother of three, we are out most of the day. Sometimes I post stuff in DD3's nap time. Evenings I'm tired so I'll study, watch TV or go on iPod, sometimes all three, and chat to DP. funnily the people I spend time with during the day are not on Facebook which I primarily use to chat yo old school friend's and work colleagues. I also share photos of the kids with mum who lives 400 miles away.
Get some people and interview them

No ethics committee involved, but then what exactly am I doing that could be classed as unethical? I' am basically observing other peoples actions.

Also, have spoken to my Tutor about this and he was completley fine about it.
I'm not trying to prove anything scientifically, just tweaking some ideas in order to facilitate a reasoned argument regarding social interaction online and in RL.

"It does seem to show that FB is all about appearances."

um - no it doesn't - unless you have a control group and a large sample size. i.e you set up 2 fake profiles, one with an attractive pic and one with an unattractive one and send an invite to the same large group of people - to eliminate other variables and ensure that the results have sufficient power.

you seem to be jumping to conclusions with very little real evidence - you need good data, collected in an ethical way, which can be used to suggest a hypothesis might be correct or false. If you are doing degree level work then you may be engaged in 'disproving the null hypothesis' but if that's the case then I'd want to know what the hypothesis was, what was your sample size etc. jumping to conclusions based on dodgy data won't get you good marks!

It's the deception that causes ethical difficulties I think ( although in slot of research deception is necessary)

It's an interesting subject

you're not observing you're intervening - it's a trap, you invite people to be the fb friend of a non existent person. I'm on an ethics committee - we might well pass this if the potential benefits outweighed the deception, but we would have a lot of questions!

oh - and ethics committees frequently ask very senior academics to change studies because they are not ethically sound - so don't assume that because your tutor says it's ok that it is!

I would advise you to look at the guidelines from the British sociological association here in particular this section

"32) However, covert methods violate the principles of informed consent and may invade the privacy of those being studied. Covert researchers might need to take into account the emerging legal frameworks surrounding the right to privacy. Participant or non-participant observation in non-public spaces or experimental manipulation of research participants without their knowledge should be resorted to only where it is impossible to use other methods to obtain essential data."

A lot of people accept friend requests to avoid insult if it is someone that they think they should/might know but have forgotten eg an old school acquaintance or who has married and changed names. After all, for many people it is very easy to just click accept and it is not as if there is any effort involved in having a FB 'friend'.

I agree that I don't see how this proves your point though - I have lots of FB friends who I actually would not be in contact with otherwise so FB has increased our contact, as for those who I would normally call/text/e-mail/write to/see - I still do. Surely somebody agreeing to be your FB friend and interacting with you that way can't prove that their face to face interaction has decreased if they would never have had face to face interaction with you anyway? For this to work properly you would have to have a control group - as yourself - monitoring contact over a reasonable period of time then introducing FB and doing a comparative study.

the relation to friends collection seems to have very little to do with what you outlined in your op as proving or disproving face to face talk etc.

I would certainly be making sure you are understanding the criteria of your assignment.

Surely ethics will be a large part of your assignment and there are ethical guidelines you must follow to ensure you acting within the law and ECHR, in my experience of sociology or psychology research I have done in the past your own consideration of ethics is always discussed some where in the assignment.

"Just to add, I could sit on FB all day and know exactly how many hours my 'friends' spent on it....it tells me on the left hand side" does it? where?

As loiner pointed out, your 'conclusion' that FB is all about appearances is rubbish from the start as you only created one fake profile with an 'attractive' picture. If the hypothesis you wanted to test was 'people respond to attractive photos on FB' you should have set up three profiles - one good-looking, one hosebeast and one that didn't have an identifying photo but used a view/a pet/a cartoon character/a logo as the profile pic.
If you don't understand that much I would not be too confident of you getting through your course. Though it is entirely possible that your tutors don't get that idea either. I have met some right fucking idiots who were alleged behavioural scientists over the years.