In Acar’s study, he explores the question of whether or not Online Social Network Services (OSNS) are different from real life social networks. He examines Facebook, an Online Social Network (OSN), in order to gain further knowledge about online social networking behavior. Specifically, he applies social network theory into Facebook.com usage and he addresses issues like self-esteem, body image, anxiety, extroversion, and gender (Acar 64).
Acar had a total of 6 hypotheses in his research, four of which were rejected and two of which were accepted after running several quantitative analyses. I will only mention the findings I thought were the most interesting. First, I learned that the size of an average online social network is larger than the size of a real life social network in a contemporary western society. While the former contains 217 members, the average number of members in a real life social network was only about 124.9. Additionally, I found out that online social networking size (OSN size) did not have a significant effect on a person’s anxiety level. The number of OSN memberships was also found to not have a significant effect on an individual’s anxiety level. Acar, however, did find a significant relationship between OSN size and extroversion. Specifically, people with higher levels of extroversion spent more time social networking and had more contacts in their online networks than introverts. Furthermore, from Acar’s study I learned that that females had more members in their online social networks and spent more time on the net for social networking than men. I actually found this finding to be the most interesting because I would have hypothesized that men spend more time than women online for social networking. For some reason I picture more men on the computer searching to make friends online (specifically female friends) than the other way around but I guess I'm wrong!
After reading the article, I think it would be interesting to investigate why online social networks are larger than real life ones. Acar mentions several reasons in his conclusion at the end of the article but these are of course only proposed factors that he thinks has influenced the size of online social networks.
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