By Mary O’ Sullivan
Facebook Overview
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service established in 2004. Initially membership was restricted to Harvard University students but it subsequently became available to other third-level institutions and then, in 2006, to everyone over 13 years old. It is available for PC, tablet and smartphone. New users provide personal information to create their profile and then add content in the form of text, photos and multimedia. A user’s timeline shows a chronological feed of their postings and updates. Users can invite and be invited by ‘friends’ to share access to each other’s information and updates. Users can also follow other users or organisations in a non-reciprocal relationship to see the followed entity’s updates, if permitted by them. The user’s news feed appears in their homepage and automatically shows status updates and other information from their friends and those they are following.
Facebook Selected Academic Literature
A review of the academic literature relating to Facebook indicates that while there have been many studies of its impact in various areas, among various groups of people, there are still many gaps to be filled. That is due to various factors including limited scope and sample sizes in research and the constantly changing nature of Facebook itself.
Kirschner and Karpinski (Kirschner and Karpinsk, 2010) refer to a general assumption that today’s young people, by virtue of living in the digital age, can cognitively multitask by processing input from multiple channels of information simultaneously. They studied the impact of Facebook use, assumed to be carried out simultaneously with study activity, on the academic performance of students in a Midwestern US university. They found that users had significantly lower academic scores and spent fewer hours studying and more on socialising than non-users; that both groups spent a similar amount of time on the internet and that users did not attribute their negative performance to the effects of using Facebook, but to their own personalities. They concluded that their study could not implicate Facebook in poorer academic performance as a number of questions emerged that indicated a wider, more detailed study was required into the actual nature of both groups’ internet activity, whether both groups differ fundamentally in personal characteristics and the lifestyles of both groups. They also reported a concern that their sample of students at a single, Midwestern US university may have been too narrow to be generalizable to other groups of students or to other demographics.
Kosinski et al. (Kosinski et al., 2015) investigated Facebook’s potential as a research tool in the Social Sciences, in particular in mitigating the traditional challenges of over-reliance on small student samples and neglect of cultural differences. They also discussed its facility to advance understanding of human psychology by providing insight into the dynamics and organization of individual behaviour and social systems. They concluded however that social scientists do not have the technical skills to leverage all the data. One recommendation they make is for social scientists to gain experience of Facebook by becoming users. They might also engage in Digital Humanities!
Facebook Timeline – Product and Usage Highlights
| Year | Details |
| 2004 | Facebook is launched and is accessible only to Harvard students |
| 2004 | Facebook has 1 million users. |
| 2005 | Facebook expands to the UK – to the Universities of Oxford, cambridge and the West of England. |
| 2005 | Facebook’s photos feature is launched. |
| 2005 | The facility to to tag friends in photos is introduced. |
| 2006 | Membership of Facebook is extended to the general public. |
| 2006 | News Feed where a user see a constantly refreshing updates from friends is launched. |
| 2007 | Mobile support for Facebook is announced. |
| 2007 | Facebook Platform enabling developers to build applications on top of Facebook’s social graph is launched. |
| 2009 | The Facebook Like button is introduced. |
| 2010 | Facebook introduces the option to Like individual comments. |
| 2011 | Facebook is estimated to hold 1 billion photos. |
| 2011 | Facebook launches iPad app. |
| 2012 | Facebook has 1 billion users. |
| 2014 | FB Newswire to help journalists find news on its website is announced. |
| 2014 | The pseudonymous app Rooms,where users can create and participate in forums on any topic without having to use their real names, is launched. |
| 2015 | Facebook announces that it will mark items it identifies as potential hoaxes so that readers can view them more critically. |
| 2015 | Facebook is accessed by 1 billion users in a single day. |
| 2016 | A set of news feed updates to combat the problem of fake news and hoaxes is announced. |
| 2017 | Facebook has 2 billion monthly active users. |
| 2017 | Trust Indicators, a tool to help combat fake news is launched. |
| 2018 | Facebook reports losing daily users for the first time ever in US and Canada, but global growth in users of 14% |
References/Notes
Kirschner, P.A., Karpinski, A.C., 2010. Facebook® and academic performance. Computers in human behavior 26, 1237–1245.
Kosinski, M., Matz, S.C., Gosling, S.D., Popov, V., 2015. Facebook as a Research Tool for the Social Sciences. The American psychologist 70, 543–556. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0039210
