STUDY: Facebook Addiction’s As Strong As Cigarettes Can’t stop checking your Facebook news feed? A new study shows you’re not alone, and the urge for a Facebook fix is at least as strong as the lure of tobacco and alcohol. The survey of 250 people was published today in the journal Psychological Studies, and revealed that sex and sleep were the two things most longed for during the day, yet the need to check Facebook was too hard for most to overcome. Despite the reputation for being addictive, alcohol and cigarettes generated lower levels of desire than the urge to check social networks. This study finding actually jibes with what we’ve observed in people’s use of Facebook, finally ascribing some statistics to the phenomenon, although we’d prefer to see a larger study sample. Researchers from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business fitted participants with devices which logged nearly 8,000 reports about people’s everyday desires. Dr Wilhelm Hofmann explains the findings this way: According to Dr.
Why Americans use social media Why Americans Use Social Media Two-thirds of online adults (66%) use social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or LinkedIn. These internet users say that connections with family members and friends (both new and old) are a primary consideration in their adoption of social media tools. Other factors play a much smaller role—14% of users say that connecting around a shared hobby or interest is a major reason they use social media, and 9% say that making new friends is equally important. Staying in touch with family members is a major factor across a range of social media users, but it’s especially important to women Those who say that keeping up with family members is a major consideration in their use of social networking sites are a demographically diverse group. Staying in touch with current friends and reconnecting with old friends is most relevant for those under the age of 50 Finding potential dating partners is at most a minor element of the social media experience
Your Negative Status Updates Rub People the Wrong Way, Apparently Why most Facebook users get more than they give About this study Half the adults and three-quarters of the teenagers in America use social networking sites (SNS) and Facebook by far is the most popular of these sites. The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project fielded a nationally representative phone survey about the social and civic lives of SNS users and reported the findings in June 2011 in a report entitled “Social networking sites and our lives.” During the phone survey, 269 of 877 original respondents who were Facebook users gave us permission to access data on their use of Facebook so that it could be matched with their survey responses. The results of that special analysis of 269 Facebook users identified in and recruited from a random, representative telephone survey are reported here. Power Users The average Facebook user gets more from their friends on Facebook than they give to their friends. Women make more status updates than men
Social networking sites and our lives Social networking sites and our lives Questions have been raised about the social impact of widespread use of social networking sites (SNS) like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter. Do these technologies isolate people and truncate their relationships? Or are there benefits associated with being connected to others in this way? The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project decided to examine SNS in a survey that explored people’s overall social networks and how use of these technologies is related to trust, tolerance, social support, and community and political engagement. The findings presented here paint a rich and complex picture of the role that digital technology plays in people’s social worlds. The number of those using social networking sites has nearly doubled since 2008 and the population of SNS users has gotten older. Facebook dominates the SNS space in this survey: 92% of SNS users are on Facebook; 29% use MySpace, 18% used LinkedIn and 13% use Twitter.
The tone of life on social networking sites The tone of life on social networking sites The overall social and emotional climate of social networking sites (SNS) is a very positive one where adult users get personal rewards and satisfactions at far higher levels than they encounter anti-social people or have ill consequences from their encounters. A nationally representative phone survey of American adults finds that: 85% of SNS-using adults say that their experience on the sites is that people are mostly kind, compared with 5% who say people they observe on the sites are mostly unkind and another 5% who say their answer depends on the situation. 68% of SNS users said they had an experience that made them feel good about themselves. 61% had experiences that made them feel closer to another person. At the same time, notable proportions of SNS users do witness bad behavior on those sites and nearly a third have experienced some negative outcomes from their experiences on social networking sites.
Facebook shows how privacy is passe - latimes.com Welcome to the post-privacy era. What's most striking about Facebook's initial public offering isn't that it values the 8-year-old company at up to $100 billion, or that this will be the biggest-ever IPO for an Internet firm. What's most striking is that Facebook is serving up to investors the prospect of 845 million users (read: consumers) worldwide being a captive market for businesses looking to sell them stuff. And in a twist that would have been unimaginable before social media took the Net by storm, we've become willing partners in the devaluing of our privacy. It's not just that we no longer feel outraged by repeated incursions on our virtual personal space. We now welcome the scrutiny of strangers by freely sharing the most intimate details of our lives on Facebook, Twitter and other sites. In 1999, Silicon Valley bigwig Scott McNealy famously declared that "you have zero privacy anyway — get over it." But he was ahead of his time. Think Netflix. And those practices are extensive.
The Mobile Difference Overview Cast a glance at any coffee shop, train station, or airport boarding gate, and it is easy to see that mobile access to the internet is taking root in our society. Open laptops or furrowed brows staring at palm-sized screens are evidence of how routinely information is exchanged on wireless networks. But the incidence of such activity is only one dimension of this phenomenon. Not everyone has the wherewithal to engage with “always present” connectivity and, while some may love it, others may only dip their toes in the wireless water and not go deeper. Until now, it has not been clear how mobile access interacts with traditional wireline online behavior. The role of mobile internet access in evolving digital lifestyles is the cornerstone of the second typology of information and communication technology (ICT) users developed by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. The second typology is based on a December 2007 survey of 3,553 American adults. Overall:
Internet Study: Facebook Fatigue is Spreading GlobalWebIndex, one of the world’s most detailed global insight studies into consumers’ online behaviour, has released the findings of its latest research which highlights both new and continuing trends in the way consumers access and use Web-based platforms. GlobalWebIndex 6 (GWI.6) analyses key changes in online behaviour, and is based on interviews with more than 122,000 individuals in 27 Internet markets. The study series kicked-off way back in July 2009, and it has since delivered six waves of research – there were three in 2011, and there will be three more following this one throughout 2012. Social networking: On the rise The latest fieldwork took place in November 2011, and it has revealed that social networking is still the fastest-growing active social media behaviour online, increasing from 36% of global Internet users in GWI.1, to 59% managing their profile on a monthly basis by the end of 2011. But wait a minute – isn’t microblogging the same as social networking?
The Social Life of Health Information 61% of American adults look online for health information. In 2000, 46% of American adults had access to the internet, 5% of U.S. households had broadband connections, and 25% of American adults looked online for health information. Now, 74% of American adults go online, 57% of American households have broadband connections, and 61% of adults look online for health information. We use the term “e-patient” to describe this group. Further, “always present” mobile access draws people into conversations about health as much as online tools enable research. American adults continue to turn to traditional sources of health information, even as many of them deepen their engagement with the online world. When asked, “Now thinking about all the sources you turn to when you need information or assistance in dealing with health or medical issues, please tell me if you use any of the following sources…” The social life of health information is robust.
Facebook Activity Those who allowed us to access their Facebook logs gave us a chance to explore a more extensive set of Facebook activities than we could capture through a phone survey. We were able to explore the frequency of these activities, how activities are related to the size of people’s Facebook friends list, how long they have used Facebook, how they responded to similar questions about Facebook activities in our survey, and variation in use by gender. A consistent trend in our analysis is the lack of symmetry in Facebook activities. On average, Facebook users in our sample received more than they gave in terms of friendships and feedback on the content that is shared in Facebook. However, these averages need to be interpreted in context. This imbalance is driven by the activity of a subset of Facebook users who tend to be more engaged with the Facebook site than the typical user. Making nearly seven new friends a month People are liked more than they like More feedback than updates Poke them back
Health Topics WASHINGTON – Health information is one of the most important subjects that internet users research online and new topics are continually added to the line-up, such as when food safety or drug recalls are in the news. In a national telephone survey conducted August 9-September 13, 2010, the Pew Internet Project and California HealthCare Foundation find that 80% of internet users look online for health information, making it the third most popular online pursuit among all those tracked by the Pew Internet Project, following email and using a search engine. However, the survey finds that not only are some demographic groups more likely than others to have internet access, but these same groups are generally more likely to seek health information once online. The most likely groups to look online for health information include: caregivers, women, whites, younger adults, and adults with at least some college education. The survey measured internet users’ interest in the following topics:
Facebook takes a toll on your mental health By Stephanie PappasLiveScience Facebook's initial public offering of stock is likely to make a lot of developers and designers of the site very wealthy. But for many users, frequent Facebooking may not be so beneficial. According to three new studies, Facebook can be tough on mental health, offering an all-too-alluring medium for social comparison and ill-advised status updates. And while adding a friend on the social networking site can make people feel cheery and connected, having a lot of friends is associated with feeling worse about one's own life. The thread running through these findings is not that Facebook itself is harmful, but that it provides a place for people to indulge in self-destructive behavior, such as trumpeting their own weaknesses or comparing their achievements with those of others. Take status updates. But once you've collected all those friends, viewing their status updates is a downer, Mukesh said. More from LiveScience: More from Vitals:
65% of online adults use social networking sites 65% of online adults use social networking sites, and most describe their experiences in positive terms. Two-thirds of adult internet users (65%) now say they use a social networking site like MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn, up from 61% one year ago. That’s more than double the percentage that reported social networking site usage in 2008 (29%). When we asked SNS users to describe their experiences using the sites, here’s what they said: Only email and search engines are used more frequently than social networking tools. Looking at usage on a typical day, 43% of online adults use social networking, up from 38% a year ago and just 13% in 2008. Among internet users, social networking sites are most popular with women and young adults under age 30. Women maintain a foothold on social networking sites. Looking more closely at gender differences, women have been significantly more likely to use social networking sites than men since 2009.