Organizations and Markets

More on Facebook

24 September 2008 at 7:12 am Nicolai Foss 2 comments

| Nicolai Foss |

We bloggers face strong competition from Facebook, as recognized in earlier O&M posts. FB integrates numerous functionalities, including blogging features, and allows narcissism to run amok in a more interactive fashion than blogging allows for. Irresistible. Therefore, smart bloggers embrace FB. As of today, O&M also has a category called “Facebook.”

Facebook is, of course, also an attractive hunting ground for all those ICT-obsesssed network sociologists or computer scientists-turned-sociologists (e.g., here and here) out there, as well as for personality psychologists. Concerning the latter, in the latest issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Laura Buffardi and W. Keith Campbell report on “Narcissism and Social Networking Web Sites.” The authors conclude, among other things, that narcissists have more friends (rather, acquaintances), more personal info and more glamorous pics of themselves on FB than non-narcissists. (Now, check this profile).

Perhaps not a surprising finding, but still good to now (particularly for job applicants, given that employers now routinely check FB profiles). And surely it won’t take long before we see the first applications in network studies of the “narcissism index” as an antecedent of this or that (“Narcissism as an Antecedent of Knowledge Sharing in Networks”). Heck, they come up with a new measure every morning anyway.

Here is the abstract:

The present research examined how narcissism is manifested on a social networking Web site (i.e., Facebook.com). Narcissistic personality self-reports were collected from social networking Web page owners. Then their Web pages were coded for both objective and subjective content features. Finally, strangers viewed the Web pages and rated their impression of the owner on agentic traits, communal traits, and narcissism. Narcissism predicted (a) higher levels of social activity in the online community and (b) more self-promoting content in several aspects of the social networking Web pages. Strangers who viewed the Web pages judged more narcissistic Web page owners to be more narcissistic. Finally, mediational analyses revealed several Web page content features that were influential in raters’ narcissistic impressions of the owners, including quantity of social interaction, main photo self-promotion, and main photo attractiveness. Implications of the expression of narcissism in social networking communities are discussed.

Entry filed under: - Foss -, Ephemera, Facebook, Institutions.