The Case for Facebook

As of 2009, hundreds of millions of people around the world are actively engaged in online social networks such as Orkut, Twitter, Digg, YouTube, Flickr, and MySpace. The online social network site (SNS) at the center of this study, Facebook, began in 2004 as a pet project of former Harvard student, Mark Zuckerberg, for socially connecting students on campus, and has since grown to over 350 million active users globally (Facebook Fact Sheet, 2009) or 5.14% of the estimated global population. It is currently the largest and most active online social network. In just the past two to three years, social media such as Facebook, has emerged as a significant hub of political activity. During the 2008 U.S. presidential elections, 46% of Americans used the internet, email, or texts messaging to get news about the presidential campaign, share their views, or mobilize others. Two-thirds of internet users under the age of 30 had a social-networking profile, and half of these used SNS to get or share information about politics or the campaigns (Smith & Rainie, 2008).

The decision to focus on Facebook is due to its’ increasing presence in the daily social interactions of young adults, the unprecedented adoption across a wide spectrum of demographics (specifically age and nationality) in a matter of a few years due to relatively low barriers of access, and its’ demonstrated capacity to mobilize a large number of people scattered geographically over long distances, and the implications those factors have in increased online and offline civic and political participation. A recent report by Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project finds that although political activity online and off remains the domain of those with high levels of income and education, there are hints of coming change in this long-standing pattern in the form of civic or political participation anchored in blogs and SNS (Smith, 2009). The report also found that some 37% of internet users aged 18-29 use blogs or SNS as a venue for political or civic involvement, with percentages decreasing as age increases.

By now, the capacity of Facebook as a powerful outreach tool in political campaigns and political and social organizing and mobilizing has evolved and matured. Capitalizing on this trend, Facebook application developers introduced Causes in May, 2007, which allows organizations or individuals to leverage their existing networks to promote their cause. Today, hundreds of thousands of nonprofit organizations representing a wide variety of missions are using the application to promote their causes and appeal for time and donations at almost zero cost; over 35 million people (All Facebook, 2009) are receiving their messages. Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign used Facebook substantially to reach out to the 18 to 32-year-old demographic, a group traditionally known for low voter turnout compared to older demographics. As a result of his campaign’s strategy, this group constituted 66% of all Obama voters (Keeter, 2008), a share that is the largest voter turnout of this demographic in recent election history. In Tehran of Summer 2009, street protests contesting the presidential election results as fraudulent turned into a full-scale political uprising assisted largely by Facebook, Twitter, bloggers, and ICT devices that shared their media and messages around the world. Normally a closed society, the immediacy and abundance of eyewitness media on these channels brought the Iranian government’s response to protestors under the scrutiny of the international community. The same year in Egypt, a country where women are traditionally inclined to tending to the home, a spike in political participation by women was occurring. Local civil rights advocates attributed this increase to mobile text messaging and in particular, Facebook, where “April 6th Youth,” a grassroots movement for peaceful political change, is said to have gained substantial footing. As it has been observed in all these instances, Facebook served as a potent facilitator of civic and political participation. In the absence of it, it would be a reasonable speculation that these occurrences and events would not have unfolded as they did and to the extent that they did.

The dynamics of social networks existing in an information-based, media-rich, and hyper-interconnected environment present new unknowns in terms of effects on civic and political participation. At the moment, literature on how these characteristics may factor into a perceived increase in level of civic and political participation, is sparse and limited. While it is not in the interest of this study to examine specific effects of these characteristics, confirming a significant difference in levels of civic and political participation between highly active and inactive users of Facebook will indicate that this particular SNS has a positive effect on participation. As such, future research will want to focus on these specific characteristics of Facebook to understand how they act as sources of political knowledge and possible catalysts of participation. This study will examine degrees of civic and political participation in relation to level and patterns of Facebook usage among young adults—the largest and most active internet and SNS users (Sydney & Susannah, 2009). Original survey data will be collected to test the stated null and alternative hypothesis:

• H0: Young adults who are active users of Facebook are less or not any more engaged in civic and political activity than inactive or non-users.
• H1: Young adults who are active users of Facebook are more engaged in civic and political activity than inactive or non-users.

Concepts

Social network site (SNS)
Social network sites are web sites that allow people to create and maintain web-based individual ‘profiles’ where they may present a variety of information about themselves to other users on the site. This information can include a combination of text, images, and video. The content of this information can be about personal interests, employer, occupation, age, birthday, etc. Users can create a network of ‘Friends’ made up of other users on the site or join one of thousands of Facebook communities known as ‘groups’ or ‘fan pages’. On Facebook, a user has the ability to send mass messages of text or other media to their entire network, community members, or with specific users, using a variety of functions on the site. On the receiving end, users are able to selectively see all messages from other users in their network and respond if they choose to. These functions are at the core of social interaction on Facebook and many SNS.

Active user
An active user is someone who has a full Facebook profile, returns to the site at least two instances or more in seven or less days, engages in at least 10 minutes of activity on the site at each visit, and is highly engaged in multiple facets of the Facebook environment (groups, applications, social games, news feeds) inside and outside of their network. An active user will have had a Facebook account for at least one year.

Inactive user or non-user
An inactive user or non-user is someone who may or may not have a Facebook profile, visits the site once in seven or more days or less frequently, and is not engaged in community groups on Facebook. An inactive user is characterized by a low level of social interaction on Facebook.

Civic and political participation (or engagement)
The notions of civic participation and political participation can be mutually exclusive or have a mutually reinforcing relationship depending on context. As defined by the American Psychological Association (2009), civic participation or engagement is “individual and collective actions designed to identify and address issues of public concern.” These issues do not always contain a political dimension. Engagement can take many forms such as volunteering, involvement in an organization, or electoral participation. Activities can include efforts to directly address an issue, collaborate with community members to solve a problem, or interact with institutions of representative democracy.

Political participation can encompass a wide variety of activity in an infinite number of contexts. Overall, it is generally understood to be the expression of support or disapproval of something political; activity related to efforts to influence a political system, candidate, party or policy; or efforts to persuade others to support or disapprove of a political system, party, ideology, candidate, policy, or action. Moreover, there are two distinct types of political participation, formal and informal.

Formal participation is characterized by elite-sanctioned activity that occurs within a political system. Activities include, but are not limited to casting a vote for a political candidate, donating money to or volunteering time for a political campaign or organization, attending a political campaign rally, or joining and participating in a group that supports a particular political ideology, party, candidate, or policy. Within this realm, there is a high degree of organization and strategic planning by political elites and supporters, such as a political party, campaign or special interest group. Such groups or individuals operate to influence participants with persuasive messages and mobilize them to action for the benefit of their specific political interests.

Informal participation is characterized by more expressive activities that may or may not be elite-sanctioned and may not take form under the framework of an established political system. Often, activities are in dissent against an establishment or policy and include, but is not limited to joining or organizing a public protest or march, efforts to publicly criticize a political policy, system, party, or official. Even acts of terrorism or sabotage (i.e. hacking a government web site) can be considered informal participation as they are often carried out by groups or individuals to express political or ideological opposition to an establishment.

Reviewing of Extant Literature

It has been suggested that young adults may be using SNS to selectively strengthen different connections within their offline networks (Subrahmanyam, Reich, Waechter, & Espinoza, 2008). These connections can be personal, professional, with people who share similar political interests, or a mixture of multiple networks forms. Further, data from studies designed to examine how social relationships relate to political involvement have established correlation between social networks and political participation (Kenny, 1992, Leighley, 1990, McClurg, 2003). If we think of Facebook as a tool to manage, consolidate, and extend one’s offline social network, then existing concepts of interpersonal attraction, social capital, and effects social networks have on civic and political participation should hypothetically still apply under these conditions. However, what these concepts may not readily explain are the social dynamics that are exclusive to a Web-mediated environment.

A 1954 study on voter formation of opinion during a presidential campaign observed that most people discuss politics with other people characteristically similar to themselves (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, & McPhee). Characteristics are noted to be social position, age, occupation, and attitude. Further, the political complexion of one’s social network is related one’s own social position. For example, considering that political parties represent their bases’ social values, those predisposed toward a Democratic vote are more likely to have Democratic friends; and conversely for those predisposed Republican. Social position or attitude, which one’s political views often stem from, is simply one dimension in a multidimensional construct that predicts interpersonal attraction (Lydon, Jamieson, & Zanna, 1988). Other examples of dimensions are physical appearance, social and cultural background, personality traits, and interests.

Interpersonal similarities and attraction alone do not predict the likelihood of political participation. McClurg’s (2003) argues that substantive, politically-relevant social interaction is a significant factor in the influence of social networks on political participation. He notes that past research overemphasized group associations, individual resources, and network form as sole determinants of participation. Little importance was placed on the kind of interpersonal exchanges that occur between people. For example, Kenny (1992) illustrates that having friends who participate makes people more likely to participate themselves. Such an effect relies on interpersonal influence in the decision to participate. Although certain network forms (i.e. marital status) and group membership (i.e. church) have been shown to be reliable predictors of voter turnout (Timpone, 1998), McClurg cautions that limiting our understanding of the roots of political participation to environmental constructs and formal social engagements (church, civic group meeting, workplace), ignores the potentially more influential factor of informal social interactions within social networks. The general tenet of the study is that politically-relevant social interaction begets political conversation, which facilitates the exchange of political information. Such discourse “exposes people to a wide range of information that may influence participatory decisions, such as information about the desirability of participation” (McClurg, 2003). The reasoning here is that “social interaction exposes people to a different set of politically-relevant information and stimuli than they possess individually” (Huckfeldt, 1979, Mutz, 2002a, Mutz, 2002b). This can have the effect of making people aware of the reasons for participating and reinforce the idea that such behavior is not just desirable, but important and worthy of attention.

The theory of social capital is also pertinent to understanding how an individual can move from simple awareness to engagement based on interaction within a social network. Social capital refers to the networks, norms, and trust that describe social life and allow participants to function more efficiently in the pursuit of common objectives (Putnam, 1995). The core idea of social capital, as put forth by Putnam (2000) in his book, Bowling Alone, is that social networks have value. This value, he argues, facilitates cooperation, mutually supportive and beneficial relations in groups. In turn, cooperation builds trust and encourages reciprocity among participants, two factors which are important in pursuing collective interests and mobilizing people towards collective action. To illustrate this further, on the macro level, groups of nations build social capital to combat global warming and at the micro level, local communities build it to combat crime in a neighborhood. In social networks, especially during high profile political elections or conflicts, the building of social capital can reinforce political positions and foster a collective actionable effort in pursuit of a political goal (i.e. electing a favored candidate into office).

Putnam (2000) further describes two distinct forms of social capital: bridging and bonding. Bridging social capital refers to social ties that link people together with others across a gap that typically divides groups in society. For example, divides among race, socioeconomic status, or religious faith. Bonding social capital, on the other hand, are social ties that link people together with others who are primarily like them along some key dimension. For example, friends in the same university or in the same study major or family members. On Facebook, there is probability that more bridging social capital is occurring when users reach out of their personal networks to create loose social ties with other users. These occurrences would be largely facilitated by the prevalence of groups on Facebook, of which there are currently 45 million active (Facebook Statistics, 2009), and also Causes. These applications tend to bring together people of different cultural backgrounds and demographics around a common interest. Such a scenario would fit predictions that SNS increases these loose social ties as a result of technology suited to maintaining these connections “cheaply and easily” (Donath & Boyd, 2004).

Considering how social capital theory can apply to online social networks as well as offline, we can consider the following questions: Is the building of social capital accelerated and/or amplified due to the hyper-interconnected (i.e. constant connection to the network via portable ICT devices) nature of Facebook? From increased social interaction? What role does the profusion of multiple sources of multiple types (video, photos, text) of news, information, and opinion media play in the acceleration and/or amplification? Are people more knowledgeable on certain topics as a result?