Laura Brewer, Ph.D.

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Academic/Non-academic Use of Social Networking
Software and Identity Crisis
Paper presented at NET_at_EDU 2009

• Laura Brewer, Ph.D.
• Chong Ho Yu, Ph.D.
• Samuel DiGangi, Ph.D.
• Angel Jannasch-Pennell, Ph.D.

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Applied Learning Technologies Institute (altI)

• We are dedicated to the advancement of higher
  education through research, collaboration, and
  action
• We are comprised of six core areas
• Research and Community Outreach
• Learning Technologies
• New Media Studio
• Distributed Learning
• Technology Integration
• Media Distribution Systems

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Overview

• Research Question
• Brief Review of the Literature
• Project Methodology
• Findings
• Implications
• Future Research
• Q/A

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Research Questions

• Identity theft or IDM is NOT the focus of this
  study rather, our focus is about
  self-identification or self-profiling.
• How are todays undergraduate students using
  social networking software (SNS) applications as
  part of their campus lives in both academic and
  non-academic ways? Is there profile segmentation?

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Definition

• Social Network vs. Social Networking
• danah boyd and Nicole Ellison differentiate and
  prefer Social Network, as the emphasis is on
  the ability to articulate and communicate ones
  social network rather than on the process of
  initiating relationships (2007)
• We use the term Social Networking in this study
  because it was the most commonly term used by our
  student population

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History of Social Networking Sites

• 1995 Classmates.com founded
• 1997 Six Degrees of Separation founded
• 2002 Friendster.com founded (dating ? playful)
• 2003 MySpace.com founded
• 2004 Orkut.com founded
• 2004 Facebook.com founded
• (Wikipedia.org)

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Social Networking Education

• The Horizon Projects Call for Scholarship
  identified social networking tools as possible
  educational tools for building learning
  communities (October 2007)
• Other research has focused on student use of
  social networking applications, and other
  technology, for social, out-of-school learning
  (Hsi, 2007)
• No mention of presentation or self-profiling.

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SNS as Walled Garden

• Nishant Kaushik SNS are popular only because
  there is no internet-wide identity management
  scheme.
• Bex Huff SNS is a walled garden.
• Really?
• It doesnt need identity theft to make SNS a
  potentially dangerous place self-identification
  is dangerous enough.

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Self-identification in a Virtual world

• Communications in a virtual world like Facebook
  or MySpace is de-contextualized.
• Friendster motivated people to grapple with
  explicit presentations of self, creatively build
  playful networks.
• Users are in a loose mode.
• Users have no control of multiple disconnected
  audience.

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An example of out of control

• A 26-year old teacher in San Francisco created
  her profile when all of her SNS friends joined
  the service. After a group of her students joined
  the service, they questioned her about her drug
  habits and her friendship with a pedophile.
  Although her profile had no reference to drugs,
  many of her friends had both. Furthermore, one of
  her friends had crafted a profile that contained
  an image of him in a Catholic schoolgirl uniform
  with testimonials referencing his love of small
  girls. While his friends knew this to be a joke,
  the teachers students did not (boyd Heer, 2006)

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Head Hunters

• Users were not aware that headhunters were
  actively lurking on SNS in order to document
  candidates extracurricular life.
• Nevy Valentine was horrified when she opened the
  San Francisco Chronicle to discover that her
  profile was featured, including her occupation of
  corporate time bomb.

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Access to SNS by strangers

• Stutzman (2005)

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IBM study

• Joan Morris DiMicco, David R. Millen
• The impact of SNS on graduates
• Three types of SNS users in IBM
• College days
• Dressed to impress
• Living in the business world

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Example of college-day mentality

• Mr. X is an active Facebook user, beginning in
  2005, checking every day, multiple times a day.
  He primarily uses the site for maintaining
  friendships with close, but geographically
  distant, friends. He has over 200 friends on the
  site, 35 of which are employees he met at new
  hire events. When he joined the company, he did
  not change anything about his profile or the
  pictures of himself. His current profile links to
  many photos of him drinking alcohol (including
  directly out of a beer keg) and attending
  numerous college parties. He feels that Facebook
  is for fun and relates only to personal life
  and hopes that if his manager ever did see this
  page would understand that it has nothing to do
  with his professional life.

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Example of dress to impressed

• Before starting his job, Mr. Y purposefully
  cleansed all information about himself on the
  internet from Facebook, his blog, and his
  personal website. In particular, he removed all
  photos of himself involving drinking alcohol.
• Actually after things are posted on the Internet,
  they stay there forever! People have a way to
  reveal deleted information.
• Like a political campaign, the candidate checks
  his/her own past over the Internet to see if any
  negative things might be used by his/her
  opponents. But usually it is too late (e.g. sex
  jokes in email).

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Example of Living in the Business World

• Ms. A joined Facebook at the urging of her
  coworkers. Since joining, she has posted dozens
  of photos of herself and has received dozens of
  wall posts from her coworkers. Most of her
  Facebook friends are coworkers whom she started
  with at the same time. These are people she goes
  to lunch with and socializes with after work. She
  works closely with some, but others could be
  considered as part of her extended work network.
• Conservative strategy Stay away from strangers
  and people that you dont know enough. But this
  type of conservative SNS users are mostly found
  in the business world. College kids love to reach
  out to strangers.

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Project Methodology

• Partnered with the Office of Residential Life for
  this project
• Online survey
• Open and closed ended items
• Designed to gather data about student use of
  social networking applications
• Estimated completion time - 10 to 12 minutes
• Data Collection Sept. 2008

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Project Methodology - Continued

• Recruitment Sept. 2008
• Email to all 5346 undergraduate students
• 11 day data collection period
• Initial invitation and two reminders to those who
  had not responded
• Under 18 years were required to opt-out

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Project Methodology - Continued

• We did not use leading questions such as
• Rate the importance of the following statement
  It is important for me to present myself on SNS
  in a positive fashion to impress my professor and
  future employer.
• Have you ever posted any photos of yourself on
  SNS that may affect your image (e.g. drinking)?
• Rather, we use open-ended questions to see
  whether the themes of self-identification,
  image building etc. emerge.

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Project Methodology - Continued

• Descriptive statistics we avoid prematurely test
  pre-determined hypotheses rather, we want to
  understand the phenomenon first.
• Text mining for extracting common themes from
  open-ended responses.
• It is NOT counting the frequency of words.
• Computational Linguistics Use AI algorithms to
  analyze the context of text, to find common
  patterns.
• E.g. I use Facebook to organize study groups,
  To hold study sessions ? Study groups.

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Response Rate

• 21 (N1140 respondents)
• To examine the representativeness, we compared
  respondents to the population on 5 demographic
  variables
• Gender
• Residency
• Citizenship
• Race
• Age

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Population/RespondentsFemale-AZ Res-US Citizen
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Population/RespondentsRace
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Population/RespondentsAge
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Social Networking Site Use
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Findings

• Students are less able to articulate value of
  Academic SNS use (serious) than of non-Academic
  SNS use (for fun).
• Self-identification/presentation or imaging
  building is not an expressed concern by students.

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First Used a SNS

• Age first used any SNS
• 32.8 respondents were 14 years or younger
• 58.8 were 15-17 years
• 18.4 were 18 or older
• Which SNS did you use first?
• 84.2 MySpace
• 13.0 Facebook
• Others lt 3

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Preferred - Why

• 75.8 Facebook
• New friends use Facebook
• For college students
• Design simple, structured
• Safer

• 23.9 MySpace
• Old friends use MySpace
• Most familiar
• Design ability to customize/create
• Fun/music

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Frequency of SNS Login
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Measuring Social Networking Experiences

• Friends
• Hours per Week Spent on SNS

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Friends on All SNS by Preferred SNS
?2 3.702E1 Plt.001
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Friends on Preferred SNS by Preferred SNS
?2 2.258E1 Plt.001
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Hrs Per Week on All SNS by Preferred SNS
?2 3.544 n.s.
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Importance Preferred SNS - Non Campus
Friends/Contacts
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Importance Preferred SNS - Campus Friends/Contacts
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Does Your Preferred SNS Improve or Enrich Your

• Academic life at ASU?
• 37.4 Facebook Users say Yes
• 15.3 of MySpace Users say Yes
• Non-Academic life at ASU?
• 70.3 Facebook Users say Yes
• 44.2 of MySpace Users say Yes

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Current Use of Preferred SNS to Improve/Enrich
Academics

• Current Use (N275)

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• Concept map yielded from text mining
• Bigger circles higher frequency Bolder lines
  Stronger connections.
• No one mentions image, presentation,
  identification, profile, career, job,
  professional etc.

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Possible Use of Preferred SNS to Improve/Enrich
Academics

• Could Use (N773)

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Preferred SNS as an Obstacle to Enriching
Academic Life

• Cheating/Perceived Cheating This will stay on
  the record.
• Plagiarism and cheating. You think you are
  helping someone but you are just setting them
  further back.
• The only potential issue I could see is if I
  was getting help from a classmate online, and
  they were giving me advice on how to solve an
  equation, or what to put in a paper. If another
  classmate saw that message, they could possibly
  use it and write something similar as me, and I
  could possibly get accused of cheating or
  something.

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Preferred SNS as an Obstacle to Enriching
Academic Life

• false information, biased opinions, non-credible
  sources
• These will stay in the record, too.

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Use of Preferred SNS to Improve/Enrich
Non-Academic Life

• Current Use (N523) and Could Use (N684)

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• Concept maps yielded from text mining
• Again, no one mentions image, presentation,
  identification, profile, career, job,
  professional etc.

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Implications

• Academic use is limited SNS is still a playful
  thing.
• Despite posting personal information on public
  websites, student responses seem to suggest an
  illusion of privacy and that SNS are used
  primarily for communication.
• Campus SNS program initiatives, whether academic
  or non-academic, should be mindful of SNS as a
  presentation or image building tool that may
  affect their future.

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Our Future Research

• This is an initial project - exploratoryand we
  have more exploring to do
• Follow-up focus groups could be helpful
• Would like to examine specific user patterns
  within identified academic and non-academic
  campus SNS groups or networked contacts

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Share Findings

• Contact us _at_ alti.asu.edu
• Laura Brewer - lbrewer_at_asu.edu
• Chong Ho (Alex) Yu - alex.yu_at_asu.edu
• Sam DiGangi - sam_at_asu.edu
• Angel Jannasch-Pennell - angel_at_asu.edu